Mitt Romney ally: Elie Wiesel's campaign against posthumous conversion is a bigoted Democratic plot

Presenting the latest installment of crazy, this time from Mitt Romney ally and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who claims that Democrats are running a bigoted campaign against Mitt Romney's Mormon faith by using Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to attack "some of their practices":

HALEY BARBOUR: The Obama campaign will not be about policy.

ANDREA MITCHELL: The Obama campaign will be about policy when it tries to challenge Mitt Romney's policies. You know that they're going to try to do that. They're going to portray him as the Etch-A-Sketch candidate.

BARBOUR: That's not about policy. That is saying, well, he's a flip-flopper, you can't trust him, his character is bad, he's mean to his dog, he's a Mormon and you know they're crazy.

MITCHELL: Well they have not gone after him for being a Mormon.

BARBOUR: They have not, but certainly other people have. Elie Wiesel, who is a big Democrat, made the point that Mormons shouldn't be carrying on some of their practices.

The practice to which Wiesel was referring was the practice of posthumously baptizing Jewish Holocaust survivors to the Mormon faith'including changing genealogical records to reflect their posthumous conversion, in the process erasing evidence of the magnitude of Nazi Germany's genocidal campaign.

Here's what he said:

I think it's scandalous. Not only objectionable, it's scandalous. . . I wonder if as a candidate for the presidency Mitt Romney is aware of what his church is doing. I hope that if he hears about this that he will speak up.

Wiesel says 650,000 "proxy baptisms" of Holocaust victims have taken place and has campaigned against the practice for years, long before Mitt Romney appeared on the presidential stage. His only agenda is to stop posthumous conversions, and at least in its public statements, the Church of Latter Day Saints itself told the Anti-Defamation League that it also opposes posthumous conversions of Holocaust survivors. Presumably, Romney would agree with that position, though his campaign refused to comment on the issue when Huffington Post asked about Wiesel's comments.

But Romney's personal views really aren't the point here. Wiesel's comments were neither bigoted nor made on behalf of the Democratic Party. Haley Barbour, meanwhile, does speak on behalf of Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, and he leveled a pretty serious accusation without any support whatsoever. The reality is that Democrats aren't running a bigoted campaign, no matter what Romney and the GOP may claim. And if they're on the hunt for anti-Mormonism, they need look no further than the 2012 Republican primary exit poll cross tabs. They'll find plenty of it there.