While major media outlets like the Washington Post love seeing GOP disaster in front-page crystal ball stories (like today’s “GOP Worries Ethics Issue May Hurt Party in ‘06“), the DNC’s actual lagging money totals have been buried inside the paper. On April 19, the RNC’s impressive financial edge over the Dean-N-C was reported as a 225-word brief on A-4: “The Republican National Committee raised a record $32.3 million from January through March, more than double the Democrats’ total.” But isn’t today’s story a lot less concrete than the first-quarter numerical totals? Aren’t Post readers getting wishful thinking in the guise of news? And it’s looking like a trend when the Post’s big predictive Sunday headline was “Bush’s Optimism On Iraq Debated: Rosy View in Time Of Rising Violence Revives Criticism.”