Could 2008 be the year of the bitch?

A few months into 2008, one trend is emerging: nice girls finishing last. (See: Silda Wall Spitzer.) After all, when Tina Fey declared "bitch is the new black" on Saturday Night Live, she was giving a screaming endorsement of Hillary Clinton, one lady who has shown that bitches—and here we mean women who don't feel obligated to play nice, especially when the stakes are high—don't go down easy. Love them or hate them (and there's plenty of both to go around for everyone on this list), we salute our nominees for the top 10 bitches of 2008. And it's only April!

---

10. Tracy Ullman
The British Bitch
Watching Tracy Ullman's new Showtime series, Tracy Ullman's State of the Union, might make you start to wonder. Does she have a personal vendetta against Laurie David? And Arianna Huffington? And Renée Zellweger? The British comedienne's irreverent imitations aren't earning her any friends on Hollywood's A-list. But, hey, maybe she's actually helping those she's targeting. Appearing on David Letterman recently, Renée Zellweger joked that watching Ullman's impersonation sent her to therapy. No shame, Renée. Checking in with your shrink never hurts.

---

9. Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz (formerly Cécilia Sarkozy)
The French Bitch
While the world was fawning over what Carla Bruni was wearing on a diplomatic visit to Britain and calling her a new Jackie O, Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz wasn't crying into her coq au vin. Au contraire. She was plotting revenge ... a revenge wedding. The former French first lady moved up her nuptials and wed PR exec Richard Attias in March, the better to counter the whirlwind Sarkozy-Bruni wedding. And, lest you forget, it was Cécilia who left Nicolas in the first place, not the other way around. She initially became involved with Attias in 2005, when she was still married to Sarkozy but on a marriage break. Love is sweet, but payback is a ... well, you know.

8. Lauren Conrad
The Secret Bitch
Since her Laguna Beach days, LC has cultivated the ultimate good-girl image for the MTV camera, tearily getting trampled by boys to men ranging from Stephen Colletti to Jason Wahler to Brody Jenner. But we're not buying it anymore. As Conrad's reality show star has risen, so it seems has her bitchiness level. In The Hills bonus episodes, witness the way in which she insists on keeping little Heidi Montag X-ed out of her circles, coolly accepts an apology from Stephanie Pratt like she's sitting on a throne and not in a plastic chair in computer class, or rips Brody Jenner a new one in a crowded club. Sure, Heidi seemed pretty nasty when she stepped in on coworker Elodie's promotion last year, but if there's any girl on The Hills you wouldn't want to find yourself on the wrong side of, it's LC, with her sugar-sweet smile that also bites and chews.

---

7. Heather Mills
The Crazy Bitch
When her divorce settlement came in at the paltry sum of $48.6 million, Mills reminded us all of an important tenet of bitchdom: Bitches don't always get what they want, but they make sure you hear about it. For Mills, that meant capping off the divorce proceedings with a splash, literally. She doused Paul McCartney's lawyer with a glass of water in the High Court, and then laughed, saying she had been "baptized in court." Another bitchy lesson to be gleaned from Heather's plight, even if you didn't get what you wanted: Pretend you did. Mills did just that by saying she was pleased with the settlement number, despite the fact that she had previously sought more than five times that amount.

6. Tyra Banks
The Diva Bitch
Miss Tyra has created a television legacy by hauling in gangly girls from all over America, taking "fashion" photos of them hanging from wires, and then chewing them out for the inability to smile with their eyes or otherwise give good face. Earlier this month, Tyra did the impossible, soaring past Oprah in online popularity on Radar's very own Fame-O-Meter. You can keep on giving, Oprah, but we prefer to take in Tyra's fierce bitchiness.

---

5. Victoria Beckham
The Skinny Bitch
The suspiciously rotund breasts, the tiny, malnourished physique, the ridiculous fashions, the bad influence on poor Katie Holmes, the always-injured husband. There are so many reasons to hate Victoria Beckham. But there's something about Posh that makes her appealing despite her plasticine fembot looks. She takes shoes from photo shoots at will. She keeps her pretty jock husband in line. And it was probably her bitchiness, not just poor ticket sales, that cut the Spice Girls reunion tour short, for which we should all be thankful. And, hey, there could be more annoying people with their body parts sticking out of shopping bags in Marc Jacobs ads. Really.

4. Ellen Page
The Little Bitch
The dimunitive actress has been a bitch on the rise since she played a teenager with castration fantasies in 2005's Hard Candy. With Juno, she earned an Oscar nomination playing a character whose sardonic tone and quick wit don't differ much from her own. But Page didn't bow down and worship Diablo Cody for writing the role. Instead, she hopped on the Diablo Cody backlash train, looking all too comfy mocking Cody when she hosted Saturday Night Live. Will the starlet machine chew up little Ellen Page and spit out a smiley, vapid, surgically enhanced little thing in her stead? Hopefully not. This month, Page stars in Smart People, and she's in preproduction for two films for next year already. Screw the golden age. Let the smart, bitchy, sarcastic little brunettes take over Hollywood.

---

3. Blair Waldorf
The Preppy Bitch
Sure, Serena's blonde and easy on the eyes, but the gossip girl to watch, or read, is clearly the bitchy brunette. Last season, as Serena and Dan's relationship grew more snooze-worthy with every commercial break, Blaire and her reputation went down in beautiful, tragic flames with a home pregnancy test plotline that recalled the work of that classic TV high school bitch of yore: Brenda Walsh. Writing on the GG book series, none other than Janet Malcolm gushed about the character of Blair in the New Yorker, saying, "Blair is both a broader caricature and a more real person than the others. Her over-the-top selfishness and hatefulness has the ring of behind-our-masks-we're-
all-like-that truth. And among her malevolent internal mutterings lurk some of the series' funniest lines." We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

2. Tina Fey
The Funny Bitch
Sure, she seems like a nice girl, but behind her specs, Fey is a real bitch. Or at least she said so on Saturday Night Live in February, when she guest-hosted and made the show funny and relevant for a change. In the "Weekend Update" segment, she gave an odd, passionate endorsement of Hillary Clinton, proclaimed "bitch the new black," and said that both she and Amy Poehler were bitches, and "bitches rule, man." Still, we weren't totally convinced. When we think of Fey, we think of good girl Liz Lemon bird watching in Germany. Then in March she told Reader's Digest that she thought she was funnier than Jon Stewart. We're still not sure about that, but we'll concede that it's a bold move, and if she is a bitch, she's of the best sort—one that makes us laugh.

---

1. Hillary Clinton
The Bitch Supreme
What more is there to say about a bitch named Hillary? Whatever your feelings about the Democratic candidate and former first lady, she's doesn't go down without a fight. A lesser man would have dropped out of the race by now, but not Hillary. She puts on her game face and signature jacket each day, no matter that she misremembered landing under sniper fire in Bosnia or just sacked her chief strategist. Smiling and crying for the cameras, plotting and scheming with Bill behind the scenes, this is one bitch not to underestimate. Last March, writing for the Times of London, Andrew Sullivan called the Clintons "zombies" in a horror film that never ends." But bitches, like zombies, can't be killed by normal measures. And Hillary, love her or hate her, will keep on trucking as long as she can. As the New York Times' Maureen Dowd noted:

It's impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama's wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.

If she brings Theresa Heinz Kerry, we're coming to watch.