William Barber II, President of the North Carolina NAACP, is certainly positioned well to address what is happening in Charlotte following the killing of Keith Lamont Scott.  It’s no surprise, therefore, that the New York Times has published his op-ed.  It’s also no surprise that Barber has some very thoughtful and thought-provoking thoughts about the protests and riots happening.

Since a police officer shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday afternoon, the ensuing protests have dominated national news. Provocateurs who attacked police officers and looted stores made headlines. Gov. Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency, and the National Guard joined police officers in riot gear, making the Queen City look like a war zone.

War zone is an apt description, and one that no one should take lightly. But in his zeal to make his point, Barber indulges in a logical fallacy that has become shockingly commonplace.

Speaking on the campaign trail in Pittsburgh on Thursday, Donald J. Trump offered a grave assessment: “Our country looks bad to the world, especially when we are supposed to be the world’s leader. How can we lead when we can’t even control our own cities?” Mr. Trump seems to want Americans to believe, as Representative Robert Pittenger, a Republican whose district includes areas in Charlotte, told the BBC, that black protesters in the city “hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not.”

What Pittenger said was outrageous. But it was said by Pittenger, not Donald Trump. It’s not that Trump hasn’t had plenty of outrageous things to say on his own, but this wasn’t one of them. And it doesn’t become something Trump said by writing he “seems to want Americans to believe…”  Not even this little wiggle dance makes it marginally acceptable to put Pittenger’s words into Trump’s mouth.

Perhaps this was just a gratuitous swipe at Trump, even though Trump has yet to make his own gaffe about Charlotte. Perhaps the editor who reviewed this op-ed finds Trump sufficiently distasteful that he decided to abandon logic and accuracy, and allowed this to go through knowing full well that it violates a half dozen rules of sound writing and thought. Who knows? There’s no footnote explaining why the standards that once dictated acceptable thought and writing at the Times no longer apply.

More disturbing is how this logical fallacy, the creation of a strawman, the imputation of one person’s words or motives to another through the mechanism of a cheap wiggle word, has become accepted and used pervasively in political rants.  When used by the village idiot, it’s hardly surprising, and one would expect that sentient readers would immediately recognize it as false and baseless.

But when such flagrant argumentum ad logicam is presented in a New York Times op-ed, it raises the question of whether “anything goes” to prevail against one’s political enemies has now become so ingrained in our culture that even the Times has grown shameless?

This isn’t a question of being right or wrong, as my issue with Barber isn’t substantive, but that this attribution of Pittenger’s statement to Trump is such an absurd abuse of logic and accuracy that its inclusion is shocking.  There are good, sound, strong arguments to be made. Don’t blow it by the cheap indulgence in logical fallacy.

Don’t give away your intellectual integrity for a gratuitous swipe at a candidate or cause you despise. And Mr. Sulzberger, shamelessness does not become an aging, dowdy gray lady.