A measure of apparent hypocrisy is found in all of us and is particularly inevitable in politicians. They must respond to changing realities as well as to the need for parties in which an individual's principles must sometimes be overridden by the compromises needed to attain power or maintain party discipline.
But there are limits to hypocrisy that must be recognised. DAB chairman Ma Lik went so far in his defence of the Communist Party - known locally as the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong - to result in him being scorned. His brain had been so thoroughly washed by years of believing everything the party told him, or wanted him to believe, that it could no long retain memory of the black events of June 4.
But Mr Ma is not the only DAB member capable of following a line dictated by the party regardless either of reality or the principles it is supposed to follow. Anything and everything can be daubed with the whitewash of 'patriotism', a word also much used by the likes of Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong to justify crimes against their own citizens.
It is, indeed, one of the merits of capitalism that its practitioners almost never deny the benefits of making money - even if they do not believe in the competition that supposedly makes capitalism work. Contrast that with the record of the DAB, supposedly the guardian of local grass-roots interests with a widening income gap.
Apparently, these representatives of the interests of the masses see nothing wrong with party members becoming billionaires, not through innovation, hard work and capitalist enterprise, but through privatisation of public assets. I refer not just to the deals that may come under scrutiny, but those where the state and party machinery is used to create wealthy individuals.
These party 'thieves' seem to believe that, now the mainland has entered a quasi-capitalist era, they are entitled to be ranked alongside the likes of tycoons including Li Ka-shing.