This is truly hilarious!

In its broadcast last night, CBS News produced a new expert, Bill Glennon, an information technology consultant. He said that IBM electric typewriters in use in 1972 could produce superscripts and proportional spacing similar to those used in the disputed documents.

Any argument to the contrary is "an out-and-out lie," Glennon said in a telephone interview. But Glennon said he is not a document expert, could not vouch for the memos' authenticity and only examined them online because CBS did not give him copies when asked to visit the network's offices.

CBS is offering an "IT professional" as an expert in this matter?

Uh, what was that about bloggers? Look, I have several degrees in Computer Science from one of the top engineering schools in the country. I have extensive experience in document processing going back to the early 80s, including lots of time on various models of Selectric -- including even fairly high-end ones, and other early document processing systems such as LaTEX. And in recent years, I've written word-processing-like software, myself.

In short, I'm many, many times more qualified to discuss this stuff than CBS's new "expert" they've just trotted out.

Yet I don't offer myself to you as an "expert" because I believe people should be convinced by the strength of an argument, not a string of letters after a person's name and/or the word "expert". I've seen countless "experts" and academics convinced of really stupid things, and, as any lawyer will tell you, you can always buy an "expert" to testify to pretty much anything you need, in court.

As lawyer Steve H. puts it, pithily:

[M]y Evidence professor had an acronym for describing expert witnesses: "W.H.O.R.E." That stands for "Witness Having Other Reasonable Explanation."

I'm sorry to say it, but one of the things that disgusts me most about my profession is the stench that emanates continuously from expert witnesses. The average expert witness would tell a jury a memo was signed by Jesus Christ as long as he was sure of the authenticity of one signature: the one on his check. I have personally lectured an expert witness repeatedly in a fruitless effort to convince him that all I wanted to know was the truth. Trying to get the truth out of an expert witness is like trying to get a cow to give chocolate milk. The very concept of telling the truth confuses them.

Otherwise, if you still are persuaded you need an "expert" opinion, then you can rest assured that when you read Random Obsevations, you're reading the opinion of a guy much more qualified to comment on the memos than the top authority on the matter CBS could locate.

Which is a bit like saying a particular stock is a better buy than Enron.

The guys from Powerline note:

The Post says that CBS is now putting its principal reliance on one Bill Glennon, an "information technology consultant." This is the same Bill Glennon, as Little Green Footballs points out, whom Time magazine described yesterday as a former typewriter repairman.

But what's really funny, as Tim Blair points out, is that Glennon first entered the fray as a commenter on the far-left Daily Kos web site! So, after sneering at bloggers non-stop for four days, CBS was finally reduced to tracking down a former typewriter repairman who posted a comment on Kos and putting him forward as their chief defender. Wonderful.

Oh, that's rich -- CBS is has apparently been reduced to searching through blog comments to find "experts" who will agree with them! So get your news and opinions from comments on blogs. Hey, if it's reliable enough for CBS, then why should we say otherwise? They're a left-leaning mainstream media outlet -- they can't be wrong.

And note, dear reader: You are learning more about CBS's "expert" from the blogosphere than you would from any one mainstream media source.

This also illustrates the new trend among the press to interpret the word "unbiased" as meaning left-leaning. Commenters to the "Daily Kos", a left-leaning blog, are apparently "unbiased experts", while guys like Charles Johnson and the Freepers are "conservative bloggers" at best.