Okay: So on his show last June, John Oliver does a segment about the coal industry and in the process, he says some very, very negative things about Bob Murray, the CEO of a coal mining firm that bears his name. Oliver even has a six-foot squirrel named Mr. Nutterbutter come out to join in the festivities.
Now, Mr. Murray is not unfamiliar with the concept of someone going on television and saying bad things about others. He's routinely gone on TV and said bad things about Barack Obama, including the suggestion that Obama should be thrown in prison for his deliberate attempts to destroy the lives of workers in the energy industry.
But I guess in Mr. Murray's mind, there's a difference between defaming the President of the United States and defaming the CEO of Murray Energy. Feeling understandably attacked by Oliver, Murray calls in what I'm guessing are rather high-priced lawyers and he tells them to sue the alleged defamer.
Now, I'm fuzzy on this next part. Do those high-priced lawyers tell Murray he's wasting his time and money and that he can't possibly prevail in his lawsuit? Do any of them say, "The same laws that permit you to tell President Obama to eat shit permit John Oliver to tell you to eat shit"?
Maybe they don't dissuade him because they want the huge fees he will be paying. Or maybe they do caution him but Murray says, "I don't care. I want to do it anyway and cause that rat bastard some money and anguish," in which case I wonder if any of the attorneys told him, "You know, the cost of fighting this suit will not come out of Mr. Oliver's pocket. HBO and perhaps some insurance firm will be paying."
And I wonder if anyone told him that by suing, he'd cause a lot of people to rally to Oliver's side and a lot of people who never saw the supposedly-defamatory segment to seek it out and view it, plus he's pretty much invited Oliver to take future shots at him. Murray — a big Trump supporter and donor — has been bragging about how much influence he has had on the current administration's rollback of environmental protections and complaining he hasn't had more. When Oliver feels free to do another segment on Bob Murray, I suspect he and Mr. Nutterbutter will have plenty to work with.