Without python, gentoo's portage is totally dead.

Here is a thread of discussion on how fix the problem. The particular solution is here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-4669397.html#4669397

Download the package from the tinderbox repository which matches the architecture of the system. Place that file in $PKGDIR on that system. Then unpack that package directly under /, tar xvjf $PKGDIR/python-2.4.4-r6.tbz2 should do it, though $PKGDIR will likely need to be manually expanded as it is not typically present in the environment. Next ln -s /usr/bin/python2.4 /usr/bin/python. Finally, emerge -K dev-lang/python.