For the people who work hard and play by the rules, winter in New England should be a time to shovel some snow, and then get out of the cold and warm up on the couch watching another Patriots’ Super Bowl run and the Celtics’ new ``Big 3’’ ring in a basketball resurgence in the Hub.

But for many senior citizens and working families in New England, there won’t be any time to dream about Super Bowl parades or the raising of championship banners. Instead, too many Massachusetts families will be agonizing over how to pay their skyrocketing home heating costs.

Recent reports say that New England consumers will pay up to 22 percent more to heat their homes this winter. But rather than help them fight the cold, President Bush seems determined to leave working class families in the cold.

Instead of increasing funding to keep up with prices, he’s asked Congress to slash funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) by $379 million.

Parents should never have to choose between feeding their children and heating their home; no senior citizen should be forced to decide whether to buy medicine or heating oil. But those are exactly the untenable choices that tens of thousands of our neighbors in Massachusetts will face this winter.

I think we all know it — next year the Republican Party is going to run as dirty an election campaign as we’ve ever seen in this country. I’ve seen it first hand, and their shadowy front-groups are going to be out in force.

And it won’t just be the Presidential race, but the entire apparatus of the Republican Party will use the same right wing “Swift-Boat” style attack tactics in every race at every level.

And in the run-up to 08, it’s already happening in a state legislative race in New Jersey.

Unfortunately, the term “Swift-Boating” which should apply only to the boats and sailors we knew and loved, has taken on a whole new meaning today. It pains my crewmates.

But the best way to reclaim the real meaning of the word is to stamp out the ugly politics it’s now associated with on the Republican side: the use of outside, shadowy groups with lots of money to spread smears and lies about someone.

Which brings us to Common Sense America. This group, run by a James Dobson acolyte, has smeared a number of New Jersey Democrats who have supported clean elections and civil rights in New Jersey. They are spending more than a quarter of a million dollars just to defeat Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, a key fighter for clean elections in New Jersey, in the 14th Legislative district.

These right-wing front groups are trying to infiltrate elections on every level, trying to turn their weapons of fear and smear against Democrats no matter the time or place.

This past September George W. Bush, the President of the United States — a position that, prior to his ascendancy at least, was generally seen as also being the nominal leader of the free world — nominated Michael Mukasey to replace his deposed crony Alberto Gonzales as U.S. Attorney General.

Mr. Gonzales, as you may recall, resigned his office under a dark cloud of accusations that included mendacity, arrogance, incompetence, and consistently putting partisan politics before public policy.

More to the point, in hearings before Congress Mr. Gonzales displayed a stubborn insistence on protecting the expansion of arbitrary presidential authority without accountability, and he repeatedly refused to condemn the use of extreme interrogation techniques like waterboarding as illegal and immoral actions that violate our nation’s best values and traditions.

And now this morning George W. Bush, the ultimate Roadblock Republican, the Obstructionist-in-Chief, petulantly accused Democrats of emboldening the terrorists and putting America’s security on the chopping block should they fail to confirm Mr. Mukasey’s nomination, thus leaving us without an Attorney General at a time when we are perched on the brink of a nuclear World War III in the Middle East. And so forth.

Mr. Mukasey, as you may recall, in hearings before Congress has displayed a stubborn insistence on protecting the expansion of arbitrary presidential authority without accountability, and he has repeatedly refused to condemn the use of extreme interrogation techniques like waterboarding as illegal and immoral actions that violate our nation’s best values and traditions.

If this was the plot of a Tom Clancy novel, it might be fascinating to read but nobody would think it could ever happen in America. Unfortunately, this isn’t fiction. It’s real life, coming to you courtesy of the single most mendacious, arrogant, and imperialistic administration in our nation’s history.