There is also a political overtone to the use of this phrase. It is not normal to have two responses, one from a party followed by another from a subgroup within that party.
Hence the user of the term may be referring to his belief that this split in the republicans is their entire party's ticket to oblivion. Not just the time-worn habit of the responding speaking being destined to obscurity.
You're over-thinking it. Virtual here means "in essence, but not in fact".
to clarify:
I certainly don't even understand the difference between the virtual extinction of the buffalo and the extinction of the buffalo.
Extinct means "no longer in existence; having died out." For the buffalo to be extinct, every last buffalo must have perished from the Earth.
The North American buffalo is not extinct. There are a few thousand of them left. They are virtually extinct.
It is virtually impossible to escape this place!
It's very, very difficult to escape, nigh on impossible, but nothing is completely impossible. Virtually nothing...
to clarify some more: I think virtually can be distinguished from almost, in that almost merely denotes quantitative proximity. If a bullet whizzed by your head, it almost killed you -- but there's a tremendous difference between being almost killed and actually being killed.
Virtually means the difference between the current state and the named state is detectable, but not significant. The buffalo is virtually extinct in the sense that it exists only in a few scattered domesticated herds. The continental masses of bison that once ruled the Great Plains, their essential buffalo-ness, are gone forever.
Best Answer
The word tautology has several different senses, depending upon its field of use.
A grammatical tautology is little different from redundancy. It just means that the same thing is repeated twice using different words.
Rhetorical and logical tautologies are more interesting.
A logical tautology is a proposition that is true given any possible variables.
A rhetorical tautology is a statement that is logically irrefutable. This can be by repetition, but in its more nuanced form it is done by stating things in such a way that it fails to make a point, while obscuring this fact in the language which is used.
So, for example:
There is no repetition in this statement, but it is nevertheless a rhetorical tautology.
Rhetorical tautologies are meant to sound profound, but they add nothing to a conversation because they literally make no point.