Second this; in all my years (granted, not a lot, but enough), this is the first time I've heard anyone claim that C has a virtual machine. You can hem and haw and stretch the definition all you want, but when it compiles to assembler, I think that most reasonable people would no longer claim that's a "virtual" machine.

Edit: if you want to argue that C enforces a certain view of programming, a "paradigm" if you will (snark), then say that. Don't say "virtual machine", where most people will go "what? when did C start running on JVM/.NET/etc?".