CARACAS (IP) – Amidst the energy and tumult of the 2008 World Social Forum, the development magazine New Internationalist announced to cheering counter-globalists that their 2008 finalist for “Sexiest Evil Woman Alive” was US Secretary of State Condoleezza “Condi” Rice.

Rice, 54, is the first African-American woman to be finalist in the New Internationalist’s annual proclamation, which has for years been the magazine’s most popular issue. Previous finalists include Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir and Belinda Stronach.

“I’m thrilled and honoured,” said Rice by telephone from aboard Air Force One. When asked what might have edged her into the number one spot, she said, “Maybe those shoes I bought in New York during Katrina.”

Rice has received high honours before, including having a Chevron oil tanker named after her, and has been praised widely for helping relieve African-American voters of the franchise burden, thereby facilitating two non-regulation US presidential elections.

“She helped deliver large quantities of depleted uranium to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis desperately craving oncological enhancement,” said an ebullient delegate at the WSF. “She helped the US public see that it’s unfair to vilify a pre-emptive war with slurs like ‘illegal war of aggression,’ or ‘the highest international crime according to Nuremburg.’”

Reached for comment beside her bubbling cauldron at FOX studios, Ann Coulter decried the magazine’s contest as “idiotic, numb-nutted liberal butt-butter,” declaring until she became the finalist, the magazine would remain “worthless in the eyes of any decent American.”

“I’m at least as evil as Condi,” she said, adding coquettishly, “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

Editors at New Internationalist countered the contest is open only to members of Homo sapiens.

From his Bedouin tent-styled palace in Tripoli, Libyan leader Mu’amr Al-Qadhafi spoke of the announcement in glowing terms.

“I support my darling black African woman,” he said. “I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders. … Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. … I love her very much. I admire her, and I’m proud of her, because she’s a black woman of African origin.”

Al-Qadhafi waxed poetically about Rice at length, suggesting that she actually runs the Arab world with which he has had severe differences in the past.

Touching down in Georgia ahead of a promised billion dollars of reconstruction aid, Rice concluded, “It all makes me so giddy. My husband—I mean, the President—couldn’t be more happy.”