Two points.

The first point is that Hannity is a shameless and disgusting mini-Goebbels.

The second is that what the FBI was willing to do is terrifying and disgraceful, and a perfect proof that far too many people in power are abundantly willing to do evil that good may come, convinced that the end justifies the means.

Such people set all our rights at nothing, and do it as a matter of principle.

"Making the hard choices," they call it.

Note that there is no hint any of them went to jail, as they all should have for decades.

And the money paid to the victims of wrongful imprisonment all came from the taxpayers, not from the criminal bastards of the FBI who colluded in perjury and sent four innocent men to prison - two of whom died there - to protect the actual murderer because he was an informant.

Smearing Robert Mueller

In an April 8 interview with John Catsimatidis on his New York radio show, Mr. Dershowitz asserted that Mr. Mueller was “the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an F.B.I. informer.” 

Mr. Mueller, he said, was “right at the center of it.” 

Mr. Bulger was a notorious crime boss in Boston, the head of the Winter Hill Gang, and also a secret source for the F.B.I.

There is no evidence that the assertion is true. 

I was the federal judge who presided over a successful lawsuit brought against the government by two of those men and the families of the other two, who had died in prison. 

Based on the voluminous evidence submitted in the trial, and having written a 105-page decision awarding them $101.8 million, I can say without equivocation that Mr. Mueller, who worked in the United States attorney’s office in Boston from 1982 to 1988, including a brief stint as the acting head of the office, had no involvement in that case. 

He was never even mentioned.

The case wasn’t about Whitey Bulger but another mobster the F.B.I. was also protecting, the hit man Joseph Barboza, who lied when he testified that the four men had killed Edward Deegan, a low-level mobster, in 1965. 

Mr. Barboza was covering for the real killers, and the F.B.I. went along because of his importance as an informant.

But the evidence — or rather, lack of it — hasn’t stopped the piling on against Mr. Mueller, particularly by Mr. Hannity. 

In a March 20 broadcast, he said, “Robert Mueller was the U.S. attorney in charge while these men were rotting in prison while certain agents in the F.B.I. under Mueller covered up the truth.”

He returned to this theme on April 9, noting the Catsimatidis interview with Professor Dershowitz, and said: “Four men went to jail. Mueller was involved in the case. Two of them died in jail. They were all later exonerated.”

. . . .

The record simply doesn’t support these assertions. 

As I explained in my decision, because of the gravity of the accusations made by the imprisoned men, I analyzed the evidence “with special care in order that the public, and especially the parties, could be fully confident of my conclusions.”

That said, I was unsparing in my criticism of the F.B.I. and Justice Department officials who were responsible for this wrongful imprisonment. 

I named names where the record supported it. 

I resoundingly condemned the government in an unusual court session in which I read my conclusions.

Mr. Mueller is mentioned nowhere in my opinion; nor in the submissions of the plaintiffs’ lead trial counsel, Juliane Balliro; nor in “Black Mass,” the book about Mr. Bulger and the F.B.I. written by former reporters for The Boston Globe.

. . . .

Mr. Barboza’s F.B.I. handlers, Dennis Condon and H. Paul Rico, and their superiors, knew that Mr. Barboza had perjured himself and that he was protecting Mr. Flemmi, but they withheld that information from state prosecutors because of his importance as an informant and to protect the informant program.

They continued to withhold the truth during commutation hearings for the men; each time the F.B.I. could have disclosed Mr. Barboza’s lie, it did not. 

In fact, the agency lobbied against clemency.

. . . .

When Mr. Hannity and others say Mr. Mueller was responsible for the continued imprisonment of those four men, they are simply wrong — unless they have information that I, Ms. Balliro, the House investigators and the “Black Mass” authors did not and do not have. 

If they do, they should produce it. If they don’t, they should stop this campaign to discredit Mr. Mueller.

No, thank you.

Ivan rejects creation, refusing to pay with the tears of a single child for endless and infinite bliss for all others of mankind, even supposing it is not an unspeakable, mad, baseless cruelty that this price should be demanded.

Imagine what he would make of the Machiavellian principle.

Karamazov, Book 5, chapters 3 and 4.

Stop at nothing for "the greater good"

Blacklist, Minority Report, Limitless, Blind Spot, and Donald Trump continually raise the question of the acceptability to the American public of Machiavellian realism, that the state may and indeed sometimes must stop at nothing.

"The desires of men are insatiable."

"Nature prompting them to desire all things and fortune permitting them to enjoy but few, there results a constant discontent in their minds[.]"

Machiavelli, Discourses, Bk II, preface.

Popular vs. Princely government

In his Discourses, Machiavelli gives us in Book I, Chapter 58 an excellent exposition of the superiority of popular to princely government.

Marvelous, and a bit surprising from the celebrated father of modern political realism.

The superstitious realist

Machiavelli, Discourses, Book I, Chapter 56.

When great calamities befall a city or country, signs and portents precede them.

No kidding.

Very interesting speculations on natural or supernatural sources of same.

Is the very air filled with intelligent beings who foresee the future and warn men out of pity?

Unsure of that, he is certain warnings are given and such portents are always followed by disaster.

And that calls to mind that as to ordinary matters of fact we believe what many believe and none we respect deny.

And we disbelieve what none we respect will affirm.

Russell was not quite right when he said the natural human response to anyone's affirmation of anything is belief.

But he was close.

Machiavelli - atheist and amoralist?

He says he accepts the Catholic religion and Catholic morals.

But he says neither can control appraisal or action in politics, the only subject on which he wants to write or give - or draw - lessons.

It has been thought he might really have been an atheist.

And an amoralist?

A worse influence than Hitler. Maybe not worse than Lenin

Machiavelli

NM's reputation as a brilliant thug, a Mussolini of his age, was well deserved.

But you can always find academics to whitewash evil intellectuals.

After all, if you can't whitewash a man you can't justify reading him, morally, can you?

And then you couldn't read him at all, could you?

Unless you were French, perhaps. 

Realism and egoism

In chapter III of his Discourses on the first ten books of Livy, Machiavelli observes.

They who lay the foundations of a State and furnish it with laws must, as is shown by all who have treated of civil government, and by examples of which history is full, assume that 'all men are bad, and will always, when they have free field, give loose to their evil inclinations[.]

The first example he gives is the arrogance of the Roman nobles and their efforts to destroy the freedom of the plebs as soon as the Tarquins, who had kept them in check, were gone.

In Rome, after the expulsion of the Tarquins, it seemed as though the closest union prevailed between the senate and the commons, and that the nobles, laying aside their natural arrogance, had learned so to sympathize with the people as to have become supportable by all, even of the humblest rank.

This dissimulation remained undetected, and its causes concealed, while the Tarquins lived; for the nobles dreading the Tarquins, and fearing that the people, if they used them ill, might take part against them, treated them with kindness.

But no sooner were the Tarquins got rid of, and the nobles thus relieved of their fears, when they began to spit forth against the commons all the venom which before they had kept in their breasts, offending and insulting them in every way they could; confirming what I have observed already, that men never behave well unless compelled, and that whenever they are free to act as they please, and are under no restraint everything falls at once into confusion and disorder.

Wherefore it has been said that as poverty and hunger are needed to make men industrious, so laws are needed to make them good.