Can Government Create Jobs?

Yes:

This bid to rewrite history has sometimes bordered on the comical - such as when Michael Steele, then the GOP chairman, stated in 2009 that not only did the New Deal fail to create jobs but that "not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job."
He might as well have said the Earth is flat. The truth is, FDR's stimulus programs created some 15 million jobs.
For instance: The Works Progress Administration put eight million people to work. (You have surely driven on roads and flown from airports built by WPA workers.) The Civilian Conservation Corps hired 2.7 million. The Civil Works Administration employed four million. The Public Works Administration created jobs for hundreds of thousands. (Perhaps you have enjoyed the PWA's handiwork, such as the Lincoln Tunnel and Philadelphia's 30th Street Station.) And not so coincidentally, the Dow Jones average rose roughly 400 percent between 1933 and 1937.
But the current obsession with red ink - with slashing spending at a time when 26 million idled and underemployed Americans badly need help - ensures that Obama's job-creation efforts will remain largely rhetorical. This is great for the Republicans, because persistent joblessness will make Obama an easier target in 2012. It's not so great for the jobless.
Back in 1936, when the New Deal was being assailed by conservatives, Roosevelt declared: "Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." Lamentably, we now seem poised to enter an ice age.

I can't believe a party that trots out job losses any time that cuts to defense spending are discussed can take the position that government can't create jobs.  But when has anybody accused Republicans of utilizing logic or being logically consistent