The IRB, the game's governing body, seem impotent when confronted by this challenge.
In effect, the aides said the government had been left to seem impotent and vacillating.
In China, by contrast, the optimists score 83%.British voters are duly punishing their politicians, who seem impotent in the face of global economic storms.
And so, in the eyes of many Iraqis here, the American soldiers often seem impotent, unable to provide security for them or their families.
Burma is one of those countries, like Zimbabwe and Sudan, whose brutal rulers have successfully defied Washington and managed to make America seem impotent in its self-righteousness.
But Mr. Obama is at some risk of seeming impotent in the face of his opposition, and House Republicans complain that their own ideas have languished in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
By making himself seem impotent, even if all he really had was a tricky back, he was quietly subverting traditional gender categories, of the kind where action, decisiveness, thrusting forward are necessarily good, and retreat, passivity, flowering all feminine.
After a week of clumsy American-inspired attempts to shut WikiLeaks down, it is now hosted on more than 700 servers around the world.The big danger is that America is provoked into bending or breaking its own rules, straining alliances, eroding credibility and because it will not be able to muzzle WikiLeaks—ultimately seeming impotent.
At a time when N.C.A.A. enforcement seems impotent, the salary for top coaches has approached $4 million and player agents and middlemen are more prevalent than ever, the overriding question is whether it is possible to run a successful program without breaking the rules.
