I'm all for discussions on the merits or flaws of a point of view/philosophy. However these personal attacks and carefully worded snipes are not discussion material, and it shows a lack of maturity.
If you want people to take your views and posts seriously, ya'll may want to be more civil. No matter how clever you word a personal attack or a snipe, it still comes off as snarky and immature.
OT: That being said, some of you have tossed out some great points, but the murky nature of The Prince is central to the real debate. If I look at the history of Machiavelli and the content of The Prince, I can see it is a 180 degree turn from his professed views. It has been said that he may have written it to get favor from the current ruling classes that did not like him or his critical views on monarchy and the idea of rule by birthright rather than merit.
Begging the expert opinions aside for a moment, I'm going to say that Machiavelli was an intelligent man, and I could see him masking a criticism in the form of a satire. Satire is a great criticism, and if he wrote it in such a way that he fooled the people he wanted to fool, it may have worked in his favor. However because of the differences in time, culture and even language, our views are forever colored by modern perceptions. So we may never actually know if he was serious or writing satirical criticisms, and if the latter was true, was he slipping it past the ruling class? Passing it off as a serious work when it was a massive joke?
The way people argue over this idea, it makes me think that we'll never actually know. Experts never agree and we can't just dig him up and ask him.