WASHINGTON — There is a problem with the Internet. Its commentary is too often dominated by pinheads. H.L. Mencken used to complain that only idiots write letters to the editor. That might have been true of his day — the 1920s and 1930s — but in our time writers of letters to the editor of newspapers and even of websites are occasionally quite well-informed and even lucid. But others, I am afraid, are indeed pinheads, sitting in their underwear back home, foaming at the mouth, believing that the whole world is profoundly interested in their every word, until the authorities arrive at their homes to take them away.

Friends have informed me that this is the case with those crybabies who protest that conservative columnists are insufficiently conservative, weak-kneed and fatuous. In the correspondence pages of newspapers and websites, they bawl for some extravagant idea about immigration, the Common Core, or some other hare-brained notion that they, in their delusion of grandeur, believe is the true conservative position on this or that. A friend suggests that I should remind these fantasticoes of “how far conservatives have come from the early 1950s when the leading exponents of conservatism could all fit quite comfortably into the corner telephone booth of a major city.”