BYRON YORK ON DONALD TRUMP AND KHIZR KHAN: Cindy Sheehan Redux?

With a few obvious differences, the uproar bears some resemblance to a white-hot controversy more than a decade ago involving Cindy Sheehan, a California woman whose son Casey was killed in 2004 while serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq.

Sheehan became a media sensation when she attacked President George W. Bush over the war. Opponents of the war immediately took up her cause in their protests, and Sheehan became, for a while, ubiquitous in media reports of opposition to Bush and the war.

Some Republican Bush supporters (including Coulter) stirred outrage with foolish attacks on Sheehan, although in those pre-Twitter days there were fewer opportunities for a single comment to go viral. . . .

One last thing. Cindy Sheehan’s son, Casey, and Humayan Khan died just 65 days apart in Iraq in 2004. The next year, when Sheehan became an idol of the antiwar cause in an increasingly bitter debate over Iraq, Democrats expressed great admiration for her.

Now, with Democrats having nominated a candidate who voted to authorize the Iraq war (only later to oppose it), against a Republican who regularly calls the war a disaster and says he opposed it from the beginning, another Gold Star parent, Khizr Khan, has become a cause — but in an entirely different context.

I wonder what they’ll flip on next?