Have tried this with the 2004.1 and 2004.2 releases with same result. Did a stage one install and the bootstrap worked fine. Did an emerge --fetchonly system then emerge system The python ebuild continually hung at checking getaddrinfo bug... (Ctrl-C or ctrl-Z exited ok). emerge python same result. Put -java in USE statement in /etc/make.conf and it emerged fine.
What version of python are you talking about? Please post the results of 'emerge info'
needinfo