In the past week, Mitt Romney has rebounded and claimed the lead once again in the Republican presidential race. And with no debates for weeks, Newt Gingrich may not be able to shift voters’ opinions for a third time. So once again, the media is back to pushing the “inevitable Romney” narrative it’s had to temporarily shelve on a few occasions. On This Week today, George Will not only agreed that Romney is inevitable, but added that the GOP race is already over.

The lie that emergency contraception is the same as the “abortion pill” RU-486 has just completed the jump from the minds of Republicans like Michele Bachmann, to Fox News opinion programming, to the broader mainstream media. On Sunday morning’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos sat mute as columnist George Will repeated the lie that the Obama administration’s Preventive Services Mandate would force religious employers to “provide…abortion-inducing drugs.”

A new poll out from Florida shows Mitt Romney with a 15-point lead over Newt Gingrich, and on ABC’s This Week today, Jake Tapper asked how Gingrich’s Florida numbers will end up impacting the rest of the race. George Will didn’t mince words, declaring right out that Gingrich does not have time on his side, and the more time he has, the more he talks, and the more he talks, the more he makes somewhat divisive remarks.

One week ago, Mitt Romney was the inevitable GOP nominee, the impossible-to-defeat frontrunner who was going to take three states in a row and end the primary season earlier. As George Stephanopoulos put it, what a difference a week makes. Now Newt Gingrich is back in the spotlight, and many analysts are wondering where Romney could have gone wrong. George Will‘s take? Romney just has too much… Romney in him.

Have we not reached a place free of this yet? For some reason, George Stephanopoulos decided to talk about the notoriously Christian NFL player Tim Tebow on This Week today. He asked George Will how Tebow has become such a polarizing figure in not just sports, but somehow in politics as well. Will called Tebow “an exemplary gentleman” and said he was undeserving of the attacks against him.

Quick! What’s one word you would use to describe Rick Santorum? …Devout? …Stylish? …Fertile? NO. The answer, according to George Will, is “fun.”

ABC’s This Week began the first in a series of big debates that will continue throughout the next year. Today’s topic was whether government is too big or not, with two advocates on each side arguing for each position, and naturally the conversation made its way to drug legalization. In quite a surreal moment, Barney Frank asked George Will his position on marijuana and if it should be legalized.

On This Week today, George Will took on Newt Gingrich’s ascendancy in Republican polls, his battle with Mitt Romney over which of them is the more electable candidate, and wondered if many of Gingrich’s new supporters were aware of his past political history. Will reacted to last night’s Republican debate by asserting Gingrich was established as a “solid frontrunner,” and right now the biggest question in the race is whether he or Romney is more electable.

The last time Donald Trump was a relevant political actor in the news cycle, it took a little longer than for most commentators for Lawrence O’Donnell to let go. Now that he’s back, O’Donnell began today’s episode of The Last Word with a thorough excoriation of Trump, Newt Gingrich for meeting with him, and a post-mortem with Chuck Todd on his Trump interview this morning.

Donald Trump appeared today on his regularly scheduled Monday morning Fox and Friends segment and fought back against critics who have vocally railed against plans for the self-proclaimed billionaire and reality show television host to moderate a GOP debate sponsored by Newsmax, a conservative media outlet. A combative Trump specifically called out conservative columnist George Will, and continued his habit of insulting the presidential aspirations of Ron Paul, calling his campaign a joke.

Now that Herman Cain is out of the Republican presidential race, we have officially kicked off the phase where everyone reflects on the ups and downs of his campaign. And on This Week today, George Will wasted no time in calling the ex-candidate “disrespectful” and a “charlatan” for using his candidacy to promote his book and not be a serious candidate bringing ideas to the table like everyone else.

Conservative columnist George Will appeared on The Laura Ingraham Show Friday to express his qualms about GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich. “Mr. Gingrich said it’s not enough that he is the smartest guy in the room, he also has to be wise,” explained Will. “Now you can associate many things with Mr. Gingrich, but wisdom isn’t [...]

George Will really doesn’t like Newt Gingrich. On the This Week round table this morning, Will began his comments on Gingrich, now a frontrunner, by stating that his candidate “embodies everything disagreeable about modern Washington,” going on to laugh at the idea that Gingrich was hired by Freddie Mac as a “historian,” and, as a final blow, speaking more glowingly of even Rep. Ron Paul than of Gingrich.

Christiane Amanpour asked George Will about Rick Perry‘s “very bad week” on This Week today, but before discussing the Texas governor’s presidential campaign, Will disclosed that his wife Mari Maseng joined the Perry campaign last week, making her focus campaign messaging and debate preparation. Will’s wife has worked previously as communications directors to both Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole. In the past few weeks, Will has written several columns in the Washington Post, one of which was highly critical of Mitt Romney, one of Perry’s chief rivals in the field.

One of the subplots to last week’s Herman Cain Bad-Press-A-Palooza (bad press that seems to have helped him) was his supposed gaffe in an interview with PBS’ Judy Woodruff on Monday night’s Newshour. The clip has widely been reported as demonstrating that Cain did not know that China has had nuclear weapons since 1964, and that he thinks they still don’t. For a week now, I’ve been waiting for someone to point out that Cain indicated no such thing.

On This Week today, George Will claimed that if President Obama should be hoping that the Congressional supercommittee convened to come up with a bipartisan plan to balance the budget and deal with high unemployment will fail, because he can’t run against a do-nothing Congress in 2012 if the public sees Congress is actually doing something. Christiane Amanpour showed a new ABC/Washington Post poll that shows that President Obama and the Republican Congress are roughly given the same amount of trust, 40 percent, when it comes to the issue of job creation.

The panel on This Week today came to the same consensus on Herman Cain: that he is not exactly a serious candidate, but rather this week’s replacement for the now second-tier candidate Mitt Romney. Christiane Amanpour pointed to a recent poll that found Cain ahead of Romney in Iowa, but George Will threw cold water on Cain’s prospects, saying that the candidate has a very unlikely chance of coming close to the nomination. Will advised to not speculate too much on the primary race, as the Iowa caucus is months away.

In a stinging comparison that is sure to leave a mark, on Sunday’s This Week With Christiane Amanpour, George Will said the rise of Herman Cain had a lot to do with Republicans coming to the realization that Mitt Romney is their Michael Dukakis. “A technocratic Massachusetts governor running on competence, not ideology,” Will observed.

On This Week today, Christiane Amanpour pointed to David Axelrod‘s comments last week specifically targeting Romney’s flip-flops, and Will took this to mean the Obama administration is convinced Romney will be their opponent in the general election. However, Will did take note of the latest candidate enjoying the media spotlight, Herman Cain, and dismissed the idea that Cain is a viable candidate for the presidency.

George Will credited Occupy Wall Street for adopting the idea of debt repudiation, a theory which has been touted by some economists, which he he fully expects to be embraced by the mainstream soon enough. Christiane Amanpour brought up concerns by some business leaders about the Obama administration’s economic policies.

On This Week today, Christiane Amanpour and the panel discussed the issue of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and whether it would be an issue for him to deal with in the Republican race for the presidency heading into primary season, or if he had too many other political problems to deal with to prioritize his personal faith. Romney’s faith was brought into the limelight over the weekend due to controversial statements made by pastor Robert Jeffries.

On This Week today, George Will argued that the Occupy Wall Street protestors should be highlighted by the media and the Republicans should embrace it because the general rowdiness of the protestors, in his view, represents “the spirit and intellect of the American left.” Christiane Amanpour reported on the Wall Street protests, which have inspired similar protests all around the country, from Occupy Chicago to Occupy DC.

George Will criticized Rick Perry’s debate performance last week on This Week today, while also criticizing the Republican party for adopting a Southern strategy in the last few election cycles that have not always yielded positive results. Christiane Amanpour, while not wanting to pile on to the Perry criticism, wanted to address his unfortunate stumbling during last Thursday’s Fox News debate. You’ll recall that Perry slightly mangled his words when going after the many flip-flops of Mitt Romney.

On ABC’s This Week, George Will argued that over the course of Barack Obama‘s term in office, the president has put too much stock in his speeches and the power of persuasion, which has made him a less effective leader overall. Christiane Amanpour introduced the segment with a summation of the Jacqueline Kennedy tapes released last week, proposing that it is in times of crisis when a president’s mettle is put to the test.

When we first learned that Hurricane Irene was headed for the United States, it was only a matter of time before comparisons and contrasts would be drawn between the response of federal and local governments during this storm to Hurricane Katrina, which Jake Tapper today described as “the hurricane that exposed mismanagement and weakness at the highest levels.”