BREAKING NEWS: Chamber Freaks Out; Endorses Establishment Candidates for First Time in More than 100 Years.

They really do eat their own: The Key West Chamber of Commerce goes feral… endorses cash-hungry greed cows — and it reads of last-minute desperation.

Ed. Note: To all my friends and colleagues… yes I got the email. — TL

Key West, Fla. — So this is great. This might be the one thing I write that I don’t have to talk about Sam Kaufman in.

Oops.

But there is a specific stench that rolls off an institution the moment it stops lying to itself, and Key West got a full lungful of it in this lovely Monday afternoon…

And employees have likely already received emails or texts telling them to vote for (Mark) Rossi, (Juan) Llera, (Greg) Sullivan and the baseball coach’s wife.

It was kind of a floral mix between king tides and low tide.

For over a century the Greater Key West Chamber of Commerce played the role of the reasonable adult in the room.

Since 1922 — 100 years or in lay terms, 1,200 months, 36,524.25 days, 876,582 hours, and 52,594,920 minutes — the Chamber has never tried to openly interfere and put it’s thumb on the scale.

Since 1922.

Of all the weasels that have sat on the clique’s chair, it took until now for them to finally squawk.

City Hall morale at an all-time low, relatives hired for jobs they aren’t qualified for… hiring replacement employees without requisitioning them through HR…

But hey! City Manager Brian Barroso is a hit at the Chamber… So he must be protected at all costs.

Smiling through ribbon-cuttings, nodding through zoning meetings, never once admitting it had a pulse, let alone an opinion. That charade is dead now. Buried at sea. The Chamber didn’t just wade into this election — it cannonballed in wearing a suit that cost more than most of its members’ monthly rent, and it’s asking us to applaud the splash.

Somewhere behind closed doors, a Board of Directors — a species that evolved specifically to avoid ever being quoted saying anything interesting — looked at the wreckage of this campaign season and decided the moment called not for restraint but for a coronation. Danise Henriquez for mayor. Mark Rossi, Juan Llera, Greg Sullivan riding shotgun for the commission. A slate, hand-picked, blessed, and mailed out to 550 businesses like a royal decree smuggled inside a chamber newsletter.

And they had the nerve — the absolute brass-knuckled nerve — to blame social media for making them do it. As if Twitter fingers and Facebook rants somehow forced a room full of grown adults with country club memberships to abandon a hundred years of studied neutrality. That’s not an explanation. That’s a hostage note written by the hostage-taker, insisting the gun just sort of went off on its own.

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Here’s the part that should turn your stomach if you’ve been paying attention: the letter ends soft. Cozy. “We’ll still be neighbors,” it purrs, like a man who just torched your porch offering to help you plant new flowers. That’s not humility. That’s the oldest trick in the book — throw the punch, then hold the door open on your way out, so everyone remembers you as polite.

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Make no mistake about what’s actually on the table here. This isn’t a business community informing voters. This is a business community picking winners, then asking to be graded on manners. The neutrality is gone, the mask is off, and whatever crawls out from under it is going to be running this island’s politics long after the ballots are counted and the confetti’s swept off Duval Street.

Fasten your seatbelts, Key West. The bar was already in the gutter — now somebody’s driving a golf cart straight through it, headlights off, laughing the whole way down.