The XX Factor: What women really think.

Help! Sneeze!

Vice President Joe Biden is clearly on a confidence high from having talked Sen. Arlen Specter into joining the other team. So now, after 100 days of relative silence, he's running his mouth again. On the Today show this morning, he said;

I would tell members of my family, and I have, "I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now," the vice president said. It's not that he's going to Mexico, it's that you're in a confined aircraft, and one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft...So from my perspective what relates to mitigation, if you're out in the middle of a field and someone sneezes, that's one thing. If you're in a closed aircraft or a closed container or closed car or closed class room, it's a different thing.

This is, of course, not what the president said last night. He stuck to the basics: Wash your hands, cover your mouth when you cough. And the problem is not that what Biden said isn't true; the Mexican government has been spreading this message for over a week. It's that it gives the impression that public officials, trading on inside information, are telling their families something they aren't telling the rest of us. His spokeswoman quickly corrected the mistake, insisting he told his family the same thing he's been telling the rest of us: Only stay out of subways and airplanes if you're sick.