It pays to call them out. Embarrass them badly enough and they will listen. I’m talking about our new overlords in Washington.

For instance, faced with an epic P.R. fail, the Biden administration announced Saturday that plans to vaccinate all of the terrorists housed at Guantanamo on Monday - today - had been “paused.”

Paused is Washington-speak for “until we think no one is looking.”

Notice they didn’t say the plan had been scrapped, canceled or reversed.

Paused.

Apparently someone in the Biden administration figured out that the “optics” of vaccinating enemies of the state before grandma weren’t good.

All across the country, governors have included prisoners as top priorities for inoculations. That’s different. These are mostly Americans who tend to be unhealthy and housed in cramped quarters, ripe for outbreaks. (Even so, Virginia has seen just 48 deaths among incarcerated people.)

Fine, vaccinate them.

But for the love of America, why would Biden want to vaccinate terrorists?

According to The New York Times, “Dr. Terry Adirim, the Pentagon’s principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, signed a memo on Wednesday that authorized the vaccination of the detainees. She is a Biden administration appointee.”

No hiding from this, Mr. President. Adirim’s your girl.

It’s critical that all of the medical personnel and military folks stationed at this tropical base be inoculated in case an outbreak occurs among the inmates. As it happens, vaccines arrived there during the first week of January and have been distributed to staff and military.

But shots for homicidal maniacs who want to kill us? No thanks.

Last time I checked Guantanamo was home to 40 foreign combatants who seek the destruction of America from an assortment of unfriendly places: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Malaysia and Somalia. 

Among the detainees is Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, who is accused of involvement in the hellacious October 2000 suicide attack on the Norfolk-based USS Cole during a refueling stop in Yemen. The explosives opened up a hole 20 feet high and 40 feet wide in the ship, killing 17 Navy sailors and injuring 39 others.

Note to Joe Biden: Norfolk has not forgotten that attack, even if you have. There’s a memorial to the Cole on the Norfolk Naval Base if you need a refresher in what happened to the sailors aboard that ship.

Do not put Al-Nashiri ahead of any American for the vaccine.

The most famous of the terrorists at Guantanamo is Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the hairy, plump guy in an undershirt, who was arrested some years ago in Pakistan. He’s the accused mastermind of the 9-11 attacks and allegedly ordered the beheading of Daniel Pearl.

Frankly, no one in the U.S. should care if he ever gets vaccinated against Covid-19.