Joe Biden got into some trouble over the last few days, as he tends to do, by making inappropriate or offensive comments. Because Biden has a long career of gaffes marked with seemingly racist pronunciations, this can lose some of its news value. So when Biden used an anti-Semitic term to refer to bankers on Tuesday, it was generally passed off as Joe being Joe. Yet while this disturbs the offended parties, the way Biden is treated by the media should really bother the vice president most of all.

To recap, Biden called predatory bankers “Shylocks” in a speech. He then called former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew “the wisest man in the Orient,” confirming both that Biden rarely has any idea what he’s talking about and that he’s several hundred years old. According to the Washington Post, Biden made a third gaffe yesterday, contradicting President Obama on the possibility of additional ground troops in Iraq. That last gaffe, being interpreted as neither racist nor anti-Semitic, flew under the radar, but to those who care about actual defense policy it should still be worth considering.

The reaction from the groups offended by Biden’s casual use of terms considered both racist and anti-Semitic were, in my opinion, also wide of the mark. The use of “Shylock” does deserve pushback, since Biden was using it in a derogatory way and of course it refers to Jews–though it’s doubtful Biden was truly familiar with the word’s original use since it was in a work of classic literature and not a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He surely didn’t mean to insult Yew, though I suppose he should have known better anyway. Either way, the RNC’s reaction that “His comment is not only disrespectful but also uses unacceptable imperialist undertones” is just bizarre.

But the criticism of Biden played into the same stereotype of Joe being Joe as did those who brushed aside or ignored the controversy. Here’s the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman:

When someone as friendly to the Jewish community and open and tolerant an individual as is Vice President Joe Biden, uses the term “Shylocked” to describe unscrupulous moneylenders dealing with service men and women, we see once again how deeply embedded this stereotype about Jews is in society.

So it’s society’s fault Biden makes offensive comments? I’m sorry, but he’s the vice president of the United States, and I don’t think “society” needs to take the blame for this one. After Biden called to apologize, Foxman followed it up with this:

There is no truer friend of the Jewish people than Joe Biden. Not only has he been a stalwart against anti-Semitism and bigotry, but he has the courage and forthrightness to admit a mistake and use it as an opportunity to learn and to teach others about the harmful effects of stereotypes. He has turned a rhetorical gaffe into a teachable moment.

“Teach others.” The only lesson Biden taught anybody here is the same one we’ve been learning for years: if you’re a prominent Democrat, you can say basically whatever you want.

That’s a lesson Biden may think works to his advantage. Certainly many conservatives feel that way. But they’re wrong. The media’s decision to treat Biden not as a latent logorrheic bigot but as a dimwitted ward of the state has virtually assured he will never be elected president.

When Biden was running for president earlier in his career, it was revealed he was a plagiarist. That truly was a “teachable moment.” Biden stopped–to my knowledge, at least–plagiarizing. Had Biden’s propensity toward cultural insensitivity been similarly addressed, he certainly would have gotten a second (and third, no doubt) chance to refine his ability to hide his apparent disregard for ethnic minorities.

Now, it’s possible this would have made no difference. Perhaps Biden is unfixable. But Americans consider the thought of Joe Biden being president to be ridiculous. This does not speak well of Barack Obama, who nominated him to be a heartbeat away, or the electorate who put him there. And it does not speak well of the media who constantly gave him a free pass, allowing him to be a jovial sidekick or a mascot when the American government probably needs someone with more gravitas than Mr. Met playing understudy to the president.

But in the end, this works against Biden getting elected president. Having turned Biden into the crazy but loveable uncle, the press forever doomed him to be a walking punch line. What he needed were his own teachable moments. He never learned how to be a serious political figure thanks to the kid-gloves treatment he received. He was able to ride that wave all the way to the vice presidency–and that’s pretty impressive. But as far as the national electorate is concerned, that’s where it ends.