It's weird, though pre existing. 

Looking at the history of that, it's rhel5 anaconda related, so it can likely go away
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=670973#c54). For whatever reason,
in rhel5 anaconda, /var/log exists but is not writeable. I can't remember if that
changed in later rhel5 anacondas or not. So that try/except/pass makes it
fall back to the stdout handler, though in a strange fashion. 

Now I'm kind of afraid to touch it after rereading that bug.