I found out Friday that I'm a liberal.

Which radio station I set my alarm clock to each night depends on what I think I'll want to wake me up the next morning -- raucous laughter, soothing music, Monday-morning quarterbacking or weather reports.

Friday morning I woke up to one of those rock-jock laff riots -- not the kind of place I usually seek out for political insight. These are the guys, after all, who can broadcast any word in the English language -- and use the Anglo-Saxon kind with sophomoric zeal, bleeping out mere fractions of the vowels -- and then complain that we're living in frighteningly repressive times.

Whatever they lack in balance, reason and learning, they make up for by trumpeting the conventional wisdom of the day -- as when comedian Ralphie May emitted this mental flatulence on a local station Friday: "I think Americans are fundamentally liberal -- they want to help people."

Thus my epiphany: Liberal = wanting to help people, conservative = wanting people to suffer. Not to boast, but judging from my checkbook, I'm a liberal, too!

The particular way this comedian measures our desire to help -- our liberalism, if you will -- is by our willingness to help hurricane victims through the donation program he's put together. His gesture is generous, his definition quite stingy.

I've been seeing far more of this muddle-headed thinking -- or mean-spirited condescension (take your pick) -- since Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. In a recent column on the vitriolic, post-hurricane rush to judgment, my description of George W. Bush as a Christian drew considerable protest from around the country. One leftist after another -- including the increasingly rare species Evangelicalus liberalis -- wrote correctly that the test of a person's religious convictions is in his actions. As some of the Christian leftists pointed out, Jesus himself said, "By their fruits ye shall know them."

But when evaluating the sincerity of a political leader, which "fruits" do we examine? His private actions or his public policies? Since we're talking about disaster relief, do we judge him by how generous he is with his money or how generous he is with your money?

Bush ran for the presidency in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative" -- the label regrettably giving an inadvertent concession to the leftists' false and long-standing accusation that conservatives who oppose vast government welfare programs are simply stingy and uncaring. However much I regretted Bush's terminology, though, I applauded his contention that non-profit social service agencies -- and specifically faith-based programs -- do a far better job than government bureaucracies at providing life-changing assistance.

Non-profits' advantages are well-documented. They win on efficiency, by spending less on overhead than any government ever does, and they win on efficacy, by taking a holistic approach with spiritual instruction and accountability requirements that changes lives.

And Bush put his money where his mouth was. A considerable embarrassment to Al Gore, Bush's 2000 opponent, emerged when the Gores' 1997 tax returns showed only $353 -- less than 1 percent -- donated to charity from several hundred thousand dollars of income, compared to George Bush's multi-year giving record of 2 to 16 percent.

This is far more, though, than just a debate over Bush's personal generosity. It's a question of whether virtue can be ascribed only to those who demand that we all display our virtue via the government. That assumption underlies ignorant utterances such as the radio comedian's.

Savvier politicos use similar moral posturing to gain the upper hand in policy debates. It controlled the country's approach to Great Society programs long after social scientists had demonstrated how disastrously counterproductive they were.

Today, similar rhetoric may be provoking the expensive new initiatives Bush proposes to help Katrina's victims. He may feel vulnerable to the rhetoric both because his administration's approach to the war on terror long ago overwhelmed his "compassionate conservative" agenda, and because his stewardship of his time (not his money) in the wake of Katrina was so tone-deaf that it appeared unfeeling.

It would be wrong if Bush now used federal programs -- financed by other people's money (ours) -- to prove that he is a generous, caring man. His dedicated foes aren't going to be mollified by such gestures anyway; they'll criticize him for unprecedented federal deficits.

Rather than make decisions to please the implacable, Bush should just be true to who he is -- a mean, uncaring, miserly conservative. (Please forgive my little attempt at comedy!)