Did they actually grow up in America?

Sometimes, the administration does things so completely bizarre and antithetical to long-standing American traditions that I think they couldn't possibly have grown up in this country.

In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.

The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States.

See, we wouldn't want to accidentally support a regime that we had under sanctions by accidentally publishing works by dissidents banned by that regime. If publishers just apply for a license, then our government can make sure that undermining an oppressive regime by publishing the work of its leading dissidents doesn't violate our sanctions regulations.

Uh, hello? Pasternak? Sakharov? Solzhenitsyn? Nelson Mandela? Aung San Suu Kyi? Any of these names ring a bell? How about Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003?

Isn't the United States the place to which people risk their lives to smuggle manuscripts? Aren't we the bastion of free speech, supporting the causes of freedom and human rights by allowing the voice of the imprisoned and suppressed trapped in totalitarian regimes to be widely heard? When did we decide we were going to stop standing for the free exchange of ideas that are being specifically crushed by the very countries we have sanctioned?

How do these guys come up with crap like this?