I think that the 'proper response' from the Blockstream guys and other's of their ilk would be to take off the gloves and go bare knuckles against the attackers, but they seem to cultured and to busy doing real work. That's probably just as well because my instinct on this could well be wrong.
Playing politics is precisely playing into the failure mode for Bitcoin. That is why I argued they should use only back channels and otherwise STFU and code.
The victory comes from code, not from talk.
Talk to explain new technologies is fine.