After the story has had a good 24-48 hours to simmer, even the mainstream press has come around to the idea that the #DNCleaks are a big deal, and they are aghast at the revelations contained therein. It’s supposed to be a big deal that the chair of the DNC and her allies repeatedly put their fingers on the scales of the Democrat race. I suppose that in the wonderful world of faux naïveté that we are all supposed to inhabit, we should all be shocked at the brazen openness with which the DNC showed favoritism in what was supposed to be an intra-party contest.

I guess the main difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that the Democrats for the most part have the decency to keep this stuff on the downlow whereas the campaign arms of the Republican party do it in the open. The NRSC openly stated that they were not going to support Darryl Glenn for Senate if he won the GOP primary over their favorites. Their consultants like Brian James Walsh regularly spout off on Twitter about conservative challengers – even when they are not running against incumbents – and never face any sort of discipline.

As I covered extensively last week, the GOP was openly hostile to rules challenges by conservatives at the convention – even those that had nothing to do with Trump or embarrassing Trump. They used their weight as party operatives and the threat of withheld funding to prevent any changes to the nominating process at all, even though the GOP itself should theoretically be neutral on this score.

The GOP and its campaign arms are openly hostile and contemptuous of conservatives and their goals, and they make little or no effort to hide it. They are regularly willing to provide cowardly “anonymous” tips to the press about conservatives who are running for office, especially if they are in any way allied with Ted Cruz. If someone were able to hack into their private emails, I would suspect that the stuff DWS said about Bernie would be pretty tame by comparison.

The one truly brazen fact in all this is how quickly Hillary Clinton welcomed DWS into the fold with open arms with nary an acknowledgement that she participated in the backstabbing of Bernie and his campaign.

But, Bernie Bros, don’t look to the RNC or to the Trump campaign for any sort of different operation. Sure, Trump might look and sound different as a politician and he might say things about trade that you enjoy, but the RNC used his ascension to the top of the party last week to actually consolidate their stranglehold on the nomination process. If you thought what DWS did was bad, you don’t want to even imagine what the RNC will do next time around.

In the American political landscape, the two parties stride the landscape like colossuses, virtually invulnerable to institutional challenges and they know it. Perhaps, though, the corruption and rot that has been exposed during this campaign season, along with the historical unpopularity of the two candidates, maybe it’s finally time that a third party can come along and break the strangehold once and for all.