Recently, Ophelia Benson has been giving the Colgate Twins a bit of a hard time about the fact that they had banned her from commenting on their blog, while they let another commenter call her a liar for months and only banned him once they realized he had been engaging in sock puppetry to boot. They just posted a response so collossally dumb it inspired me to stop ignoring them for the moment.

First, they say they had good reason for banning Ophelia:

she was sending us emails demanding to have other posters’ comments deleted. We had a better solution.

So the issue wasn’t so much that they thought she was leaving nasty comments, but they thought it would be so funny and ironical if they banned her for telling them (privately) they needed to keep a better leash on their nastier commenters?

Then they tell us that Benson is wrong about what happened, and to “set the record straight,” they tell us:

These claims are meritless…

Indeed, we have checked our logs, and the first appearance of the “bilbo” who also turned out to be “Tom Johnson,” “Milton C,” etc, was in September of 2009. Long after Benson had been banned.

Except Ophelia never said otherwise. She said that she was banned, and a guy who called her a liar wasn’t banned. Actually, she’s pointed out that a lot of people were calling her a liar on the Twins’ blog without getting banned, she’s just highlighting the fact that one of these people was also an incredibly dishonest person himself (and blatantly so, such that the Twins should have figured it out much sooner than they did). The order of events wasn’t part of Ophelia’s point, nor was there any reason it needed to be. There were, however, other people calling her a liar on the Twins’ blog before she was banned.

I almost dashed off an e-mail to Ophelia telling her not to worry so much about the Twins, though looking at her blog post I think she has the right attitude:

These are not honest people. We knew that, but boy does this underline it. These are shockingly dishonest people.