EDWIN EDWARDS is back in the news. He seems to think voters in Louisiana can forgive and forget his time-as in doing time-as a long-term guest in a federal facility. One with bars and heavy locks.

Hey, it’s Louisiana, Land of the Longs and lassitude. Uncle Earl would understand. And maybe folks in that Louisiana congressional district in the middle of the state will actually send him to Washington as a congressman once again. They’ve done worse. Or at least crazier.

Think of Louisiana as a South of the (state) Border kind of place. It’s our only Mediterranean state, said the late great A.J. Liebling-gourmet, gourmand, racing and boxing aficionado, and one helluva writer. He’d be sorry to miss Edwin Edwards’ comeback campaign. It’ll be like Napoleon’s hundred days after his escape from Elba-or was it St. Helena that time? Angola? We get ’em all mixed up, like the vagaries of Edwin Edwards’ political career and our own Bill McCuen’s. Anyway, Happy Days Will Be Here Again, at least till all the Edwin Edwards types meet their Waterloo.

Yes, it’s another gamble for the Gret Stet’s old Silver Fox, who’s getting more silvery and more slippery all the time. But the man knows gambling. Years ago, as that state’s lottery was going online in Louisiana, somebody asked the then-Governor Edwards if he’d buy a ticket. No, the old craps-shooter replied. “The odds are terrible.”

Or as a card-counter of our acquaintance said when he was being escorted out of still another casino by the guards after taking the place again, but told he could play any game in the house except blackjack: “No, thank you, I don’t gamble.”

Oh, if only A.J. Liebling or, even better, the irrepressible Spider Rowland of the late great Arkansas Gazette, one of our forebears at this statewide venture, were here to cover Edwin Edwards’ triumphant return, or at least give odds on it.

GRANTED, the odds in the Arkansas Lottery are worse than on Edwin Edwards’ being elected to Congress again. But that doesn’t keep suckers from buying tickets. Daily drawing tickets, multi-state lottery tickets, scratch-off tickets, you-name-it tickets. Even in this state, where dry counties still exist here and there, losing lottery tickets litter the landscape, blowing in the wind, worthless. The way losing tickets add to the litter at Oaklawn. And the money used to buy all those losing tickets is gone, gone, gone. Or at least gone into the Arkansas Lottery’s bank account.

But there is happier news: Once again the Arkansas Lottery is falling behind when it comes to fulfilling its quota of suckers. Just last week, the director of the lottery, Bishop Woosley, had to tell the commission that oversees his state agency and official numbers racket that lottery sales have dropped. Yet again.

This time, Bishop Woosley-we always picture him with a mitre and a shepherd’s rod-has had to tell the commissioners that sales for this February were almost 7 percent below last February’s. Uh oh. Can the suckers be wising up?

What this means is that Arkies had 7 percent more to spend on their bills-luxuries like food, for example, or the light bill-instead of throwing away the rent money on odds that are always lopsided in the house’s favor. The number of mathematically impaired folks buying lottery tickets seems to fall every month. And that is good news for everybody except those making the astronomical salaries at the Arkansas Lottery’s HQ , who are the only sure winners in this scam.

But the carnies running this lottery don’t like the drop-off in ticket sales,not one bit. And they want to make it easier to take the pigeons. Now comes a brilliant idea from The Bishop: Let folks buy lottery tickets with debit cards! The commission, always open to awful ideas, has given him the go-ahead to lobby the Legislature for the change.

Why, sure. If some folks are wising up, then just make it easier for the rest to spend more of what little money they have. There’s one born every minute.

“And I’m not selling [debit cards] from a revenue standpoint,” Bishop Woosley told the commission. “I’m selling it from a becoming-irrelevant standpoint. I don’t know that it’s going to have a huge sales lift on our part, but I hope it does.”

If you can understand all that, you might could work at the lottery. And make a six-figure income, too. Let’s just say that hope lives eternal in the hearts of scammers, especially those with impressive salaries and an ecclesiastical sound to their name. The Bishop may not be disappointed. To adapt a phrase coined by a bon vivant named Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the savvy of the great American public, Lord help it.

We wouldn’t advise trying to make sense of The Bishop’s latest dispensation word by word. It could make an innocent observer dizzy. So the revered Mr. Woosley is not pushing these debit cards from a, uh, Revenue Standpoint? But he does hope debit cards provide a Huge Sales Lift. But that would seem to be a Revenue Standpoint selling point, would it not? Or are we hopelessly addicted to intelligible language?

Clearly we’ll never make it in the modern world, or at least in the modern bureaucracy, where this kind of newspeak runs rampant, lest us simple types catch on.

Of course The Bishop’s selling this idea-Debit Cards Allowed Here-because he thinks it’ll increase the lottery’s take. Otherwise, what would be the point? It’s this kind of verbal tap dancing that makes so many folks so suspicious of anything coming out of the lottery’s front office. Would just being straightup with the commission and the public be so hard? Or does conscience get in the way? Of course it does. Which is why it needs to be ignored in these semantically tangled matters.

AFTER FOLKS get used to swiping their debit cards to get their lottery tickets, and once grocery stores and gas stations set up the machinery to allow it, the Arkansas Lottery will be just one step away from being able to take a credit card. So folks can not only spend this month’s rent on lottery tickets, but next month’s, too. How convenient.

The brass at the lottery-and they’ve got plenty of it-will doubtless claim they would never want that to happen. But they say all kinds of strange things. See the latest statement from Woosley, B., this past week.

Thankfully, the director of the Lottery who wants to have debit cards available, and the commission that gave him permission to push this brainstorm into law, can’t pull this off without going through the state legislature. And that body doesn’t meet again until its regular session next year. And even then it just might have enough sense-and conscience-to say No. Or even better Hell, No!

Doubtless some lawmaker will carry the Lottery’s water come 2015. And introduce a bill allowing the use of debit cards. While legislators who don’t want the lottery to do even more harm than it’s already doing will vote to nix this terrible idea. The question is, will there be enough clear thinkers in the Ledge to keep this scam at bay?

Keep the good thought. Lawmakers can surprise. And do the right thing from time to time. Here’s hoping, for Arkansas’ sake, this’ll be one of those times.

Editorial, Pages 10 on 03/24/2014