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.
Dimon steered his bank so ably through the financial crisis but has seemed impotent as his bank and his own reputation have been trashed.
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.
When Orfeo approaches the gates of Hades, and furies and ghosts try to bar the determined husband's path, their ominous choral cries of "No" seemed impotent against Ms. Blythe's unrattled singing of Gluck's steadfast melody.
