“I don’t recall this happening here before, a picket outside the home of a political contributor,” reporter Stewart Ledbetter said on WPTZ.

Burlington’s Lenore Broughton is a wealthy Vermonter and the sole contributor to the new Vermonters First SuperPAC. Her group is running an anti-ShumlinCare TV ad campaign. A small group of political activists who favor the single-payer plan marched through the hill section of Burlington, ending up at Broughton’s home; she was out of town. Tayt Brooks, Vermonters First’s executive director, called the picketing a “bullying tactic.”

Erm. No.

It is only bullying when Repugs (the power structure) do it to Dems (the professional victims) so Mr. Brooks probably can’t claim bullying.

It is a popular tactic of the left. See, any disagreement with the one true path is not deserving of American protections because it would ruin their perfect hairdos.

Mayor Thomas Menino (D-Boston) and Rahm Emanuel (D-Chicago), for example, tried to bully the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain straight out of business because its president, Dan Cathy, supports “the biblical definition of the family unit.” Even the liberal Chicago Sun-Times and the Boston Globe strongly criticized that “anti-conservative bullying.”

Meanwhile, vandals spray painted some Romney signs in Greensboro, NC, last week. The red paint formed the well-known circle crossed by a diagonal line across the candidate’s name. Reports say Obama “community organizers” were in the neighborhood at the time. That kind of personal vandalism may be becoming more prevalent by Democrats.

I’m thinking that, particularly in the anti-Lenore Broughton case, there’s a fine line between free speech/right of assembly and attempt at suppression of same. The marchers were definitely trying to stop her from expressing herself.

That’s the story I’d take to the public and, since she has the bucks, I’d make sure the news video footage (or better, jerky cellphone video) makes it into an ad and over to the network news desks with the copy that this is how the left tries to quash democracy.

Federal, state, or locally, we will get exactly what we vote for in 22 days. Let’s be careful out there.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that almost 70% of students believe it is not safe “to hold unpopular views on campus.” An example quoted merely to amplify the point about bullying turns out to have distracted us from that issue. The discussion centered on whether the numbers were accurate rather than who was the bully. It’s a good question which we will take up separately next week.