In a recent conference call, Newt Gingrich said, “I fought President Reagan when he tried to raise taxes in 1982, I fought President Bush when he tried to raise taxes in 1990 … that took a fair amount of courage.”

Katie Pavlich, Townhall.com’s News Editor, says that while factually true, “Gingrich has built much of his campaign based on his ties to Ronald Reagan.” She also noted that before Gingrich launched his own negative attacks against fellow GOP candidates, he was telling Republicans that they should be obeying Reagan’s ’11th Commandment’, the idea that a Republican shouldn’t speak ill of another Republican.

Pavlich said, “For Newt Gingrich to now come out against Ronald Reagan, and his own rule that he’s been talking about throughout his campaign, is hypocritical at best.”

Reagan’s son Michael, who is backing Gingrich in the GOP race, then called in to Your World to defend the candidate saying, “To say that Newt threw my father under a bus, because my father raised taxes and Newt was against raising taxes, there were a lot of conservative Republicans who were against my father, in fact, raising taxes.”

He went onto say that many people would bash Ronald Reagan today for not being a “Reagan conservative.”