appeared in a video at the 2002 Academy Awards.

Granderson also noted that critics were forgetting that Michelle Obama "is not actually a politician, she's married to a politician."

After first expressing outrage about the current first lady's Sunday night cameo, conservative pundits like radio host Dana Loesch and columnist Michelle Malkin later rushed to defend Oscar appearances by Laura Bush and Ronald Reagan.

"Reagan was former president of the Screen Actors Guild. Sorry, did I miss Michelle Obama's past career in Hollywood?," Malkin wrote on Twitter Sunday night, adding that the first lady would soon "be in every movie theater preview telling you to shut your cellphone off & put away the popcorn."

"The left can't produce a video of Laura Bush presenting because it doesn't EXIST," Loesch argued. "They want to deflect because FLOTUS presenting shows bias and the propaganda involved around their 'Zero Dark Thirty' flick."

But Costello's point seemed to be that the first lady had better things to do with her time: "Imagine if Michelle Obama would reach out to Ms. Boehner... And they had lunch together and they talked about their husbands."

"I think the Oscars jumped the shark, like, four hours before Michelle Obama was even on TV," CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash told Costello on Monday. "Jumping the shark had nothing to do with Michelle Obama."