New Orleans’s “red-light district” was “festooned with red, white, and blue bunting” during the 1976 Republican National Convention, the “smut peddlers” placing “elephants” in their store windows.

Those twelve quoted words are the only real overlap between the 804 pages of Rick Perlstein’s newly-released The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan and a prior Reagan biography by right-wing publicist Craig Shirley. But Shirley’s attorneys are demanding $25 million in damages from Simon and Schuster and a pulping of all copies of Perlstein’s book.

The Times’s public editor has offered a kind of apology for giving the claims any daylight. And with “spurious” as their word of choice, liberals have rushed to call this a smear job. They certainly occupy the high ground, for every other claim of plagiarism is either dubious or patently absurd; one of the passages identified by Shirley is just a quotation, duly cited, of Shirley. Perlstein’s endnotes — posted online, not in the book, in a regrettable economizing move — cite Shirley no fewer than 125 times. In his acknowledgments he states, “Craig Shirley’s book on Reagan’s 1976 campaign saved me 3.76 months.”