Right in character, there was David Duke blaming race for his various election defeats over the years in Louisiana.

Bitterly Duke said that he lost because his GOP opponent in one special election “was quite successful in referencing a nostalgia that would give hope, comfort, settle grievances, for millions of people who were upset about gains that were made by others because—”

The interviewer prompted Duke to get to his point: “What you’re saying is millions of black people.” Replied Duke: “Millions of black people, yeah.”

The interview was typical of Duke’s racial pandering and….oh wait. Apologies. Somehow I got this confused. This race card player wasn’t David Duke at all. It was Hillary Clinton.

Yes, you read that right. In an interview with Jane Pauley on CBS Sunday Morning, in which the failed 2016 Democratic Party nominee was promoting her new book What Happened, Clinton actually sounded exactly like former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, blaming her loss on race. The exchange had Clinton saying that Donald Trump “was quite successful in referencing a nostalgia that would give hope, comfort, settle grievances, for millions of people who were upset about gains that were made by others because—”

Queried Jane Pauley: “What you’re saying is millions of white people.”

To which Clinton assented, saying: “Millions of white people, yeah.”

Newsflash? There is nothing either new or startling here. Clinton is a believer in “identity politics” — the grandchild of slavery and the son of segregation, the latter two racist policies the political fuel for Clinton’s party from its birth, not to mention the later “progressive movement” that was folded into the party by Woodrow Wilson. The latter perhaps the most racist president in American history who celebrated the pro-Ku Klux Klan film Birth of a Nation in the White House when he had some down time from segregating the U.S. government and the U.S. military.

The real problem here is that the mainstream media rolls over for this, giving all those race-card playing progressives a pass. For a reason.

To acknowledge that race is the political fuel of the Left would be to admit that the perpetual charges of racism directed over the decades at everyone from GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964 to Breitbart today are not only flatly untrue but deliberately designed to distract from the real perpetrators whose obsession with race is what runs the Democratic Party and the progressive left.

To see how the Left plays the game one only needs to take a good look at all the recent uproar over not just taking down monuments to various Confederate leaders but going back to the Jefferson Memorial to add information about Jefferson’s ownership of slaves. As Breitbart reported a while back, “the president of the Trust for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. says ‘the physical symbols of American history and democracy will be scrutinized and challenged’ in the near future.”

Really?

Sitting in splendor on the Mall is another monument, this one to the president who made it his mission to get the Jefferson Memorial built in the first place. That would be Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Democrat and progressive Roosevelt not only pushed the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts in 1934 to erect the memorial to Jefferson, once funded FDR personally laid the cornerstone for the memorial in 1939 and would dedicate it at its opening on April 13, 1943 — the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s birthday.

In 1997 President Bill Clinton dedicated the newest memorial on the Mall — this one to FDR himself. And what did Hillary’s husband have to say at that dedication? As seen here, Clinton enthused over and over about all the aspects of FDR’s presidency and career, calling Roosevelt “the greatest President of this great American century.” One FDR accomplishment after another was recalled by Clinton — except one.

Franklin Roosevelt is the president who went out of his way to appoint a lifetime member of the Ku Klux Klan — progressive Democrat and Alabama Senator Hugo Black — to the United States Supreme Court. And why not? Progressives and racism were the peanut butter and jelly of Leftist politics. As a sitting Justice it was Black who, leading the five other FDR Court appointees in the 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision, wrote the opinion that gave a thumbs up to the internment of Japanese-Americans. A decision based not on the Constitution but on race.

Will the Trust for the National Mall add this interesting information to the FDR memorial? We will see. What about adding to the corrective list the segregationist views of the Washington park memorializing former president Lyndon B. Johnson? Or the Potomac-spanning Woodrow Wilson Bridge? Or the Richard B. Russell Senate Office Building — Russell the author of the notorious “Southern Manifesto” that opposed civil rights and desegregation.

But the point here is not just that the FDR memorial and all the rest of these Washington monuments ignore both FDR’s Klan relationships and the racist roots of these other monuments/memorials and buildings that dot the Washington landscape. The point is that whether it was Democratic Party founder Jefferson or Jefferson Memorial backer FDR or LBJ, Richard Russell or Bill Clinton in 1997 and Hillary Clinton today, playing the race card while skillfully attributing racism to others is a staple of the American Left. Then, now, and always.

Hillary Clinton may be the latest — but she isn’t the first. Indeed, here is her husband Bill Clinton calling the Trump slogan of “Making America Great Again” racist — even though he himself had used the exact same slogan when he ran for president.

In essence Hillary Clinton, like all of her race card playing predecessors in her party specifically including her husband, is merely the latest to play the race card.

The serious problem here is that the mainstream media doesn’t have the guts to call Hillary out as the new David Duke — or in fact just the latest reincarnation of the rest of the shamefully infamous and always Leftist Party of Race.

Not to worry. In this corner? I will.

Jeffrey Lord is an author, columnist, former Reagan White House political director, and former CNN commentator.