The New Year Quote by Robert Luskin

This is legal damage control dressed up as reassurance: a sentence engineered to cordon off blame before it has a chance to attach. Luskin’s phrasing does two jobs at once. On the surface, it absolves “Karl” from responsibility for the delay. Underneath, it narrows the question the public is allowed to ask. Not why the resolution was delayed, not who benefited from the delay, but a single, tightly framed point: don’t link the delay to Karl’s conduct.

The structure is telling. “The reason... had nothing to do with” is a classic prophylactic move, signaling that a causal narrative is circulating and needs to be cut off. The clause “did or failed to do” is lawyerly symmetry, preempting both active wrongdoing and negligent inaction, the two basic vectors of liability. It’s less a statement of facts than a statement of boundaries.

Then there’s the strategic vagueness. “This resolution” floats without detail; “Karl” is first-name familiar, humanizing and domestically shrinking the figure in question. Luskin doesn’t offer an alternative explanation, which is often the point: you deny a connection without volunteering a new thread for scrutiny.

Contextually, this kind of sentence shows up when there’s a procedural stall that looks suspicious - a board vote, a filing, a settlement, a political censure - and someone’s reputation could become the story. The subtext isn’t “Karl is innocent.” It’s “Stop treating causation as character evidence.” In an era when delays read as tactics, the line tries to keep bureaucracy from turning into motive.