Last night the men's basketball team from Siena College played Alcorn State because there are 65 teams to fit into the NCAA basketball tournament bracket which, unfortunately, has room for only 64.
This is called the play-in game.
Just so you can get your bearings, Alcorn State is located in Alcorn, Mississippi which, according to its web page is, "approximately an equal distance - 40 miles - from Vicksburg to the north and Natchez to the south."
Siena College is located in Albany - officially Loudonville - New York which is, rhetorically speaking, exactly he same distance from Vicksburg and Natchez (read, ANYwhere) as their opponent.
While it is easy to poke fun at the participants of the play-in game, consider this: There are 310 Division I schools in the country. 245 of them are not in the NCAA Tournament. At all.
The game was won by Siena which now gets to play the number one seed in the tournament, Maryland on Friday night.
That game will be played in Your Nation's Capital where the political equivalent of participating in the play-in game is being on "The Short List."
The short-list has always been of personal interest to me because from Hillside Grade School all the way through basic training at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina whenever someone said, "line up in size order" I was at or near the front.
But this type of Short List is different. It is indicative of being a finalist for some position. Every four years - at the change of Administrations - "The Short List" challenges "have-a-nice-day" as the most overused clich� in town.
During the transition between Administrations you will hear - ok, you will overhear - earnest men and women leaning toward each other at every lunch and dinner table at every power restaurant in town discussing who is on The Short List for every Associate-Deputy-Junior-Under-Assistant-Secretary position of every Department in the Federal Government.
And around the country, at every lunch counter in every town square every person who has had any connection with any political activity drops his or her voice, looks to the left and to the right, and very quietly confirms the gossip that he or she IS on The Short List.
For years afterwards, people will remark upon that person once having made it to The Short List thus separating them from all the tens of millions of their fellow citizens who were never even considered.
As Alfred Lord Tennyson might have written, for those in the play-in game as for those on The Short List, "'T is better to have played and lost, Than never to have played at all."
Speaking of Short Lists, one hopes the Justice Department is building (as Arthur Sullivan and William Gilbert might have written) "a little list" of who might have leaked the classified document on the nation's "Nuclear Posture Review" which burst onto the front pages of major newspapers over the weekend.
According to the LA Times, "Congressional sources said the report went to the Armed Services, Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees in early January." This past Sunday, the New York Times reported, "The New York Times obtained a copy of the 56-page report."
First of all, this is only the third time in 20 years that an official review of the U.S. nuclear posture has been reviewed. In 1981, President Reagan asked for an update. Then in 1997, President Clinton was presented with an update - although that document still considered Russia the principal threat.
The Defense Department issued a statement saying, "The Department of Defense continues to plan for a broad range of contingencies and unforeseen threats to the United States and its allies. We do so in order to deter such attacks in the first place."
And Tom Daschle wonders why President Bush is so loathe to provide the Congress with every detail of every plan which is being pondered on every subject by every official - every official who made it off The Short List and into an Administration job.
The Secret Decoder Ring page, today, has the whole stanza from the Tennyson poem, photos of Gilbert and Sullivan and the weekend article on the Nuclear Posture Review from the LA Times.
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