There are lots of people talking about Rev. Wright and Obama’s speech. Here is a sampling. Feel free to point out more in the comments. The first one is from a commentary I saw on CNN. The others are after the jump.

Derrick Ashong (on CNN): Too often these conversations are ended before they’ve truly begun, due to the ignorance, intransigence or simple unwillingness of people to acknowledge the validity of what the other side has to say.

Who can honestly argue that black America is not today contributing mightily to its own social, cultural and economic decline?

Who can honestly argue that white America has not been willfully blind and too often complicit in the injustices that continue to be visited upon people born with darker hue or stranger accent?

Sean Braisted: Ultimately, I don’t know what impact this speech will have in quelling the controversy. Those conservatives, looking for a reason to hate Obama, have found it, and aren’t going to give it up. They’ll parse his speech for evidence that he too shares the same sort of racial resentment that Wright does…and with enough time, and a pair of scissors and glue sticks, they will probably succeed.

Roger Abramson: Oh I get it now, see, if you don’t support Obama, you’re supposed to really go off on his speech, never mind that it was possibly one of the greatest high-profile speechifying efforts given by an American politician in a generation, and certainly better than anything we’ve ever heard from Bush I, Clinton or Bush II.

Pat Buchanan: the constant sense of putting the burden on the society for what’s happened to the African-American community and not enough of the acceptance of responsibility of their own — their own responsibility, frankly, for what’s happened.

Our Ginger: I want to believe that having him as our President will be a unifying force in our turbulent world, but learning that he sat under the counsel of a man like Jeremiah Wright for 20 years is disturbing to say the least.

Egalia: The same Republican ad creators who transformed war hero John Kerry into a sniveling and cowardly loser are now salivating over the prospect of Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee.

Redstate: However, the difference between you and me is not slavery. The difference is not the past. The difference between us is the future. I can not, and must not, live in the past. You said today, quoting Faulkner, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”

John Norris Brown: It would have been perfectly understandable if Rev. Wright had simply “confessed” that he sometimes had trouble trusting white people or that he feared racism. But the tone he used, and the hate he seemed to project (not to mention the language) is truly disturbing. It seems to be a sin of hate, pure and simple, not a sin of weakness or fear.

Glen Dean: This isn’t some “crazy uncle” or some distant supporter, or staff member. This is his spiritual mentor, the man that married he and Michelle, the man that Baptized his child, the man that led him to Christ (the black Christ, not the Jewish one btw). Obama, who up to now seemed like an honest man, has proven himself to be a liar.