Continuing his salted earth campaign against Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, conservative columnist George Will said the former House speaker “embodies almost everything disagreeable about modern Washington.” “He’s the classic rental politician,” Will continued, suggesting that Gingrich’s political positions are for sale to the highest bidder. Will — whose wife works for Rick Perry — said Gingrich should hope people focus on his philandering and infidelity, instead of his pay-for-play influence peddling. Watch it:

Later, Will said, “I didn’t even get to finish my list,” to which he added, “absurd rhetorical grandiosity.”

Gingrich is reeling from revelations that he was paid over a million dollars to peddle influence for failed mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Even disgraced former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff has called Gingrich “corrupt[].”

Responding to Will, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman quipped that Gingrich is “a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.

Today on ABC’s This Week, host Christiane Amanpour wondered whether Newt Gingrich will run in to some difficulties running for president considering he has been married three times. Noting that Gingrich recently converted to Catholicism, NPR’s Cokie Roberts said that “there are an awful lot of divorced Catholics who are very pained by this situation of their own divorce and feeling like they can’t be Catholic,” adding, “and to have this sudden new Catholic with three wives is not going to play well with them.” Conservative columnist George Will, however, said that Gingrich’s problems extend far beyond social issues:

WILL: He’s been out of elective office for 12 years. … Newt Gingrich’s problems are so far beyond just his multiple marriages and all that. His ethanol love affair right now. ON the 7th of March he said, “Let’s go Qaddafi.” On the 23rd of he says, “I never favored intervention.” He did it on television. … He’s one of these people who says that to understand Barack Obama you need to understand his “Kenyan anti-colonial mentality.” This is just not a serious candidate.

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Over the past few weeks, several Republicans have followed the Tea Party’s lead in declaring that they will vote against any increase in the national debt ceiling. Today, on Meet the Press, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) drew a thick line in the sand, declaring, “I’m not going to vote for a debt ceiling increase unless we go back to 2008 spending levels, cutting the discretionary spending.”

On ABC’s This Week, conservative columnist George Will responded to Republican opposition to raising the national debt ceiling and the threat it poses to the fiscal solvency of the nation:

I know of no other developed nation that has a debt ceiling. This is a purely recurring symbolic vote to make people feel good by voting against it.

The trouble is it’s suicidal if you should happen to miscalculate and have all kinds of people voting against it as a symbolic vote and turn out to be a majority. Because if the United States defaults on its sovereign debt, the markets will be — well, it will be stimulating.

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Will’s analysis echoed remarks made earlier by Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, on ABC’s This Week. “The debt ceiling is not something to toy with,” stated Goolsbee. “If we get to the point where you’ve damaged the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.” Goolsbee also noted that the impact of blocking a debt ceiling raise on the economy would be “catastrophic” and would bring on “a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008.”

Last week, Justice John Paul Stevens announced that he will retire from the Supreme Court at the end of the current term, giving President Obama his second Supreme Court vacancy to fill. Today, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) urged Obama not to select “someone that is so activist,” while Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said that Republicans could filibuster “if the president picks someone from the fringe or somone who applies their feelings instead of applying the law.” On ABC’s This Week, conservative columnist George Will criticized conservatives for saying that they want judges who will strictly follow the law while simultaneously cheering decisions that overturn the work of elected officials:

There’s another test, and it’s wielded by my conservatives, and I think it’s mistaken. And that is, they say they’re against judicial activism. By which they mean they want the court to defer to the elected political branches of government. But if you look at what’s happened recently, the decision that most outraged conservatives was the Kelo decision on eminent domain. … The court did defer to the city government in Connecticut and it enraged conservatives. The recent decision that most pleased conservatives — Citizens United, overturning part of McCain-Feingold — was the court not deferring to the Senate.

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Cokie Roberts noted, “that’s very relevant right now, because you have these 14 states’ attorneys general, saying that they want to overturn, the court to overturn the recently passed health care law.”

On ABC’s This Week roundtable yesterday, conservative pundit George Will took a jab at Nobel Prize-winning economics professor Paul Krugman. After Krugman noted that ObamaCare bears a lot of similarities to RomneyCare, he tried to dissipate people’s fears about what’s in the law. “I do international trade stuff,” Krugman said, “somebody should look at a trade agreement which typically runs at 23,000 pages, right? This is nothing much.” Will responded, “Well, first of all, Paul’s prize is in economics, not practical Washington wisdom.” Watch it:

Apparently deeming himself a Nobel laureate of “Washington wisdom,” Will proceeded to offer a dose of his brilliance. “One of the ways that this simple, workable legislation is going to be made to work is the IRS is going to hire about 16,000 new agents,” Will proclaimed. That may be Will’s version of “Washington wisdom,” but it’s not true. This past week, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman debunked the right-wing myth that IRS agents are going to auditing taxpayers to determine if they have health insurance.