Take note I have posted smears from the Gingrich side that are also just as untrue. This from Gateway Pundit:

It should be clear by now that the elites in the Republican Party will do and say anything to destroy Newt Gingrich or anyone else who challenges the Romney machine. Drudge, Coulter, Britt Hume, the folks at National Review, Jen Rubin etc. are just a few of the prominent conservatives trying to not only persuade you that Romney is some sort of conservative, but that Newt Gingrich, Reagan’s Young Lieutenant, is some kind of squish.

Legal Insurrection today sets the record straight on the Gingrich record. Professor Jacobson dug up this video from 1995 where Nancy Reagan tells a conservative audience that,

You’ll have to decide for yourself how much of the latest Romney smear campaign you’re going to believe but as Jeffrey Lord writes, “Quite to the contrary of the Romney message, Newt Gingrich was in fact one of Reagan’s Young Lieutenants.“

The linked article of Jeffrey Lord in the Gateway post ends like this:

… This utterly dumb line of attack for Romney is as bad if not worse than Gingrich’s flirtation with attacking Bain Capital. It raises exactly all the questions of Romney’s vulnerabilities. Why, for example, did Romney deliberately play the wimp when it comes to defending Ronald Reagan in Massachusetts? At precisely the time in the fall of 1994, it should be noted, when Newt Gingrich was leading Chapter 2 in the Reagan Revolution? Is Romney really trying to draw attention to the fact that while Gingrich and hundreds of Republicans were on the verge of a historic landslide retaking the House by attaching themselves to the Reagan legacy… Romney ran from Reagan… and got clobbered?

If even those simple political basics can’t be learned, which in Romney’s case now include not just the broader inability to defend either Reagan or free markets but the quite specific inability to use the general principle of free markets and capitalism to defend himself over the inevitable “Mr. 1%” accusations — this should be a red flag for conservatives.

Who knows why Romney gets tongue tied? Or, as our friends at the Wall Street Journal note, “befuddled.”

This guy is not so befuddled:

Legal Insurrection has been the leader on dealing with this topic of bashing Newt with false ideas, and is even bringing the fight (and rightfully so) between “cousins” to the DrudgeReport with history and facts, LI has this:

…For several days Drudge has been running almost around-the-clock negative banners against Newt, hyping negatives and burying news which contradicts the Romney campaign narrative that Newt was anti-Reagan.

Against the anti-Newt crusade stands a wealth of counter-viewpoints of people who were in a position to know and who share very differenct recollections of Newt and Reagan, via Josh Painter in the comments:

Reagan Nat’l Security Advisor Bud McFarlane: http://bit.ly/zd9eAF

Reagan Economist Art Laffer: http://bit.ly/xEDETi

Reagan WH political director Jeffrey Lord: http://bit.ly/zw2ZMb

Reagan Policy Analyst Peter Ferrara http://bit.ly/zq1QxI

Reagan media consultant Richard Quinn: http://on.msnbc.com/y2sPM2

Reagan’s Speechwriting Dir. Bently Elliott: http://thedc.com/xOkDvA

Reagan’s older son Michael Reagan: http://bit.ly/yYVy7L

Reagan’s beloved wife Nancy: http://bit.ly/zrWvAw

I’ll add to that Peter Robinson, former Reagan speechwriter, who wrote the historic Berlin Wall address in which President Reagan urged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!”:

Newt shared the frustrations of many conservatives, including, from time to time, me, that the President permitted the bureaucracy to prove persistently feckless, undermining his program–as you’ll recall if you’re of a certain age, conservatives were always insisting that the President’s staff should “let Reagan be Reagan.”  If Newt mouthed off, giving vent to these frustrations, so be it.  He was in Congress.  That was, in a sense, his job.  And at one time or another, every conservative of any standing felt exasperated or worried–and urged the President not to go soft either on Communism or on our own bureaucracy.  Newt’s comments here place him in the company of William F. Buckley, Jr.–WFB vented his frustrations more artfully, but he vented them–and I’d have thought that for our friends at NR that would be quite good enough.

Drudge has 30 million visits a day on his side.  We have history on our side.  Make it known.