Conservative columnists

I think Ezra's right (and Josh Patashnik's wrong) that party affiliation (or the best approximation thereof) is probably the best determinant of which sort of political columnist one tends to agree with.

But to me the biggest problem with conservative columnists isn't so much their over representation as it is their likeness. Whereas there's a pretty wide range of thinking about, say, foreign policy in the liberal punditocracy, a great majority of conservative pundits are basically indistinguishable from each other on the pressing issues of the day. If the Post dumped Charles Krauthammer and the Sun-Times stopped syndicating Robert Novak's column etc. etc. until there was perfect balance, does anybody really think we'd see a major change in the political direction of the country? I definitely don't. And I don't because the remaining conservative pundits--Kristol, Barnes, Hiatt, Brooks (for all intents and purposes), Will, and the rest--would remain as single-minded as they are right now, creating the impression through false consensus that crazy ideas like bombing Iran are widely held and equally widely respectable.