If you are following US politics it’s been a bonanza season.

Liberal-leaning watchers will have been perversely exhilirated and appalled by the candidates’ push into the wild extremities of the right. Centrist-conservative-leaners will have been merely appalled.

But despite an escalating sequence of rightiness, I find that I can still be shocked — coming across this item from the superblogger Andrew Sullivan, buried instantly in his daily cascade of posts. Sullivan, that sane apostate from the conservative cause (I didn’t leave them, they left me), has taken a hair-raising reading from the latest reports on Israel’s calculations over Iran:

Israeli officials say they won’t warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the discussions.

Sullivan writes:

What it amounts to is a formal declaration that, if the US attempts at any point to differ seriously with Israel’s far right, the alliance is over . . .

So Israel would, without warning, put US troops and Western civilians at direct risk of terrorist assaults, would likely tip Pakistan into even more outright hostility to any cooperation with the West, and rally the Iranian opposition to its foul regime . . .

He makes a brief case against the Israeli PM, but it’s as compelling as a slowmotion video of a truck coming at you. And this breath-taking punt:

Here’s a prediction. Netanyahu, in league and concert with Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, will make his move to get rid of Obama soon. And he will be more lethal to this president than any of his domestic foes.